Operencia: The Stolen Sun review
By The dungeon puzzles are more traditional. Memorizing the timing of spike traps for instance, or measuring out a precise amount of wine to fill a keg using two bottles of different sizes. They often feel more like an element of pacing than of challenge, giving you something to mull over between the other pillars of Operencia, which are fights and the campfires where you rest, regaining your hit points at the cost of a piece of firewood while your companions trade stories.
Those companions are a likeable bunch who banter and reveal secrets in a way players who miss older BioWare games will enjoy. Unfortunately, campfires are the only place you can switch party members in and out, and you can only access equipped items held by current party members in a different set of menus. It makes moving gear between them a hassle.
Issues like this, and the occasional bug (like one that dropped me through the bottom of a forest), were minor complaints. For the first 10 hours I thoroughly enjoyed Operencia. Then I got to the Copper Forest, where I had to trek back and forth on a search for keys that involved pixel-hunting, much more opaque puzzles, and encountering the same enemies over and over.
Even the fights against skeletons had some variety—sometimes they have bows or magic—but here I fought endless groups of identical Copper Soldiers with a bunch of resistances and immunities, the ability to drain energy making me rely on basic attacks rather than fancy ones, and hundreds of hit points. Even their attacks were boring, and eventually I turned down the volume so I didn’t have to hear the whine of their buzzsaw blades five times in a row every turn.
Later areas weren’t quite so bad, but they never got back the magic of Operencia’s opening. The puzzles were more about scouring the environment for hidden clues or tiny objects, and though some interesting new enemies appeared the sluggish feeling never quite went away. It was only rarely as inventive or delightfully strange as it had been at the beginning, once upon a time.
Operencia ended up being a game I wish I liked more. Its first half was enchanting and clever, but the second half was a slog and the main thing I gained from it was some trivia about a giant Hungarian owl with a weird copper wang who scares children.
