Iesabel (PC) review "Thank you, Mario, but our princess is trying to kill you."

On its surface, Iesabel (pronounced “YEH-ZUH-BELL”) appears to be your average Diablo-inspired trip. It sports an isometric presentation, features warriors bashing things and snatching up loot, and comes with a lovely soundtrack that smacks of “fantasy roleplaying.” Composer Dawid Grzegorczyn did a fine job with this one, bringing forest BGMs with a sense of serenity, dungeon cuts filled with your usual doom and dread, and a catchy desert-themed tune that plays as you approach the tower in the final phases of the adventure.

Everything else proves serviceable initially. You can easily sink hours into simplistic combat, looting items, incessantly drinking potions, boosting levels, raising stats, and acquiring new skills like any other hack-'n-slash RPG. Yet, something feels off, as if there are little touches that cause the finished product to come across as cheap or amateurish...

The first red flag raises as you hit the character select screen. Most titles like this start you off with three classes and some unlockable or downloadable dudes. The standard offering consist of a warrior, a ranger, and a mage. Iesabel provides two of these options in a barbarian and a witch. If there are any other classes that remain locked, then I'm not sure how to unlock them. Even still, two is a rather weak number for starter classes.



Granted, a lack of selectable classes doesn't serve as a death knell, but it's still difficult to shake the disappointment. As you advance, though, you'll find more questionable bits of design. For one thing, targeting proves needlessly difficult. Wolves approach you, and you intuitively click on them, expecting your hero to rush forward and give them a good thwack. Instead, you stand there, puzzled. As it turns out, you must click and hold on a target just right to coax your avatar into action, and even then they inexplicably stop fighting. There's a handy alternative to this: the 'S' key, which automatically takes you to the nearest opponent and puts your left hand in position to easily hit the hot keys for quick potion or skill usage.

Cutscenes play out as you advance, many of which either come with unfortunate distractions or puzzling developments. The tale starts with you as one of four warriors selected to visit a shaman who stands as the head of a wizard council, as your quartet is needed to deal with a major evil force amassing in a desert kingdom. This very important figure lives in a hut in the middle of nowhere for some reason, which seems like an awful place to keep someone who might be a target for assassins. Sadly, tragedy befalls your party when an unseen evil kills everyone except you. And how does the shaman greet you as you approach him? By accusing you of killing everyone and forcing you to prove your innocence by engaging in a handful of run-of-the-mill quests.

Seriously, people in town want the same things everyone in every hack 'n slash wants: kill the pests in the cellar, fetch some items, clear out a mine infested by monsters, and the like. So you venture forth, ignoring the game's wonky and sometimes incomprehensible dialogue—complete with spelling errors, redundant wording, unnecessary apostrophes, and missing necessary apostrophes—to prove you're no murder.

You do so by killing things. I don't know, man. I don't write 'em, I just play 'em.



On the whole, the campaign's balancing does a fine job of escalating just right in the “easy” difficulty setting (which you're required to play first), sending you foes that you might struggle to deal with initially. You grow more powerful as you persevere, but only so much thanks to that difficulty setting's experience value depreciation, which comes with each gained level. Even when your adversaries become weaklings, you still must contend with each area's fittingly convoluted structure.

At last, you finish this little affair and attempt to write it off as “decent, unpolished, and forgettable.” That is, unless, you're like me and you have to finish a project on the medium difficulty setting before you consider it done. By defeating the final boss on “easy,” you unlock “medium,” which allows you to restart the shebang with your character, only with a “harder” campaign. It's there that new issues arise, plus all the negatives you were able to ignore reinforce this product's cheapness.

For one thing, there's supposed to be a storage box in which you can place items that cross over to any other character you've created. Other games, like Torchlight, have utilized a feature like this effectively. It's a pleasant concept because it makes all the piles of witch-exclusive gear you loot as a barbarian not seem like a waste of time or space. The box also gives you a place to deposit powerful weaponry you might not be strong enough to use yet. There's only one problem: the chest deletes anything you drop into it. Players have notified the devs for years, and yet the glitch persists. Anyone coming into this foray freshly is likely to have an aneurysm when they realize the impressive new hammer, wand, or breastplate they plopped into the container now lies in digital limbo.

Yes, I encountered this playing through the easy mode, but I was able to look past it at first. However, flying through medium mode and experiencing its shortcomings only brought those memories back. For one thing, medium's experience values don't depreciate much, allowing you to sit in an early-game area and grind until you hit the level cap of 99. Seriously, the creatures you face early on provide as much experience as those fell far into the proceedings. Despite being a higher difficulty setting, medium allows you to become a veritable killing machine.


It's then that you notice even more just how much of the campaign consist of padding. Numerous occasions see you going back over previously visited maps, battling similar beasts repeatedly and to the point of annoyance. The final act stands as the worst offender, where contrived scenarios spring up everywhere in an attempt to lengthen out the tale. Of course, you couldn't just go to the desert, knock the palace gates down, barge into Princess Iesabel's citadel, and commence slaughter. Even still, there could have been more compelling plot beats than talking to a couple of rude guards, killing mosquitoes and nabbing alcohol for them, padding back across two fields to return to the guards, being refused entrance despite all of your work, returning to the swamp, talking to more rude people, buying more alcohol for them, going on a hunt for a key in a sewer so you can access the town next to the kingdom, finding out the town doesn't directly lead to the kingdom and that you need to return to the sewers, and finally blasting through miles of fortress real estate.

And no, it doesn't stop there. At one point, you ascend a tower to confront Iesabel. Instead of meeting you in her chamber, she's pissed off to some other hellish dimension, the entrance of which is on a previous floor...

And yet—YET—I can't call Iesabel a horrible title. Subpar, maybe; mediocre at best. The thing is the game held my attention enough to get the job done despite itself. With some fixes, improved scenarios, and additional content like new classes, it could've been the next Torchlight, offering a budget-priced alternative to Blizzard's classic hack 'n slash. Instead, it comes across as a cheap imitation, lacking the polish and cleverness the previously discussed games showcase.

Staff review by Joseph Shaffer (January 18, 2025) Rumor has it that Joe is not actually a man, but a machine that likes video games, horror movies, and long walks on the beach. His/Its first contribution to HonestGamers was a review of Breath of Fire III.