Mysterious Realms RPG (PC) review "The game with a title so uninspired, thinking up a clever pun feels like a waste of my time."

There’s an equal chance I’ll either come back later to improve that tagline, or just admit defeat on this one.

On the surface, Mysterious Realms RPG is a game so generic that it actually considers Mysterious Realms RPG an appropriate title. The introduction is a text dump of broken English that might be poking at the fourth wall a bit, or it might just be bad. The gist? Fantasy shenanigans! You control a party of two who have to save the entire world, on the understanding that the entire world consists of one town and the small collection of monster nests inconveniently located scant meters away. The game looks like something from the Windows 3.1 roguelike shareware catalogue a la Castle of the Winds, with comparable depth. To be clear, you should not be expecting an off-brand Spiderweb Software game. Realms just ain’t that deep.

You’ll find everything you’d expect to find in short order. Procedurally generated dungeon floors filled with goblins and spiders to ineffectually stab at. Hidden traps you might disarm, but probably won’t. Loot to horde and new weapons to discover or purchase at ye olde weapons shoppe. Experience points to reap and invest, skills to bolster, and delicious statistic points to engorge. It would be lusciously easy to write Realms off as just another shallow not-quite-Rogue game, but it’s not. Because its combat is this weird jumble of deck building, colour matching and gem collecting that I’m now obliged to try and explain. I’ve not been looking forward to this part so, if I fail to explain it properly, I promise, it’s actually pretty cool.



Okay. So. Each of your two characters have up to four abilities on tap, and these are all governed by superficial colours you’re randomly dealt at the start of each battle. Except, they’re not just colours, they’re also numbers, so each gem serves two functions upon being played. Using enough gems of a certain colour will enable you to use your abilities, while the numbers correspond to the amount of damage spending that card will inflict on the enemy forces. Except, those five gems are a shared pool across your duo. It means you have to try and balance out your cards so you’re not neglecting one line of attack and stacking all your hopes on one avenue of damage.

Except, that’s just the basics of it. You can cause bonus damage if you link together certain combinations of colours, and the gem stack don’t refresh at the end of each battle. Which is great is you’ve been building something and the stupid wood golem dies before you can unleash it. Or, it’s bloody awful, because you panic dump resources into downing that fire elemental, and now your cards are a mess. It’s a constant battle of not only trying to win the war you’re waging, but trying to ensure you’re in a good place for the next fight that comes along.



Really Realms is carried by the unique strategy the gem/card arsenal provides, and it’s not shy about this. There’s no deep lore about the monster lairs; they just need to die because some moron built an entire village a mere stone’s throw away and have only now realised this could have been a bad idea. The town’s stores don't just let you pick up a handful of healing items and some slightly less awful armour, but give you the chance to sink funds into your deck. You then have to make the tricky choice on where your money goes; building up your deck around your preferred abilities or equipment upgrades needed to keep yourself alive. Each becomes equally important as your dungeon delves climb in complexity.

Soon, you’ll be triggering random events that might ask for a simple stat check, or might require you to sacrifice a card for the rest of the expedition. Or you’ll discover ways to initiate trades or take on extra busy work tasks for bonus experience or items. There’s occasionally clever touches applied to the late dungeons to make sure you’re not sleeping on them, but exploration is Realms’ obligation rather than its highlight. There’s little to separate the low-end fantasy adventuring from the throngs of other games that have taken a swing at being My First Exile. But what does separate it, the multi-tiered deck-based combat, is the fevered machinations of a lunatic. It won’t make a lot of sense to people taking their first faltering steps into the novice dungeons where you’ll mow through cannon fodder regardless of what you do, but you’ll have to learn how it all fits together sooner rather than later if you want to progress. It’s unique, it’s weirdly engaging and, above it, it’s a hell of a lot more interesting than I was was expecting from a videogame that willingly labels itself Mysterious Realms RPG

Staff review by Gary Hartley (August 15, 2021) Gary Hartley arbitrarily arrives, leaves a review for a game no one has heard of, then retreats to his 17th century castle in rural England to feed whatever lives in the moat and complain about you.