SPELLBOUND
NEED TO KNOW
WHAT IS IT?
A fantasy RPG with survival elements
EXPECT TO PAY $40
DEVELOPER Nine Dots Studio
PUBLISHER Deep Silver
REVIEWED ON GTX 980, Intel i5-6600K, 8 GB RAM
MULTIPLAYER Online and local co-op
A game where you can never die sounds like it’d make you fearless. Why worry about failure when you simply fall unconscious and wake up somewhere else? It turns out the opposite is true here. Failure costs something more precious than a videogame life—it costs time. Time to heal, to rest, to repair gear, to travel all the way back to the site of your defeat to try, and possibly to fail, again. Immortality is more terrifying than death.
You can’t just reload your last save when you lose a fight, because constantly auto-saves your progress. Every lengthy trip across the map (there’s no fast-travel or mounts), every purchase at a vendor or skill upgrade are harsh, and feel punishing at times, but beyond making your failures meaningful they also make triumphs monumental.
