This is Backlog Roulette, a series in which I randomly pick an unplayed game from my backlog and play it. As always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

When presented with the disturbingly organized spreadsheet of games that I own, the digital dice selected Antharion (bizarrely stylized “AntharioN”, but I won’t keep that up), by Orphic Software. A quick search through old emails revealed that I actually backed it on Kickstarter back in 2012 — a time when this brand of isometric, turn-based role-playing game was rare — but the campaign failed to reach its funding goal. Orphic Software immediately launched a new Kickstarter campaign to fund development, but I didn’t pledge to that one. I did, however, purchase the finished game in 2017. That’s a couple of years after its 2015 release, so I’m guessing I saw it on sale. Since then, I’ve eyed it in my spreadsheet on several occasions, but always ended up picking something else to play. Now that the dice have selected it, I decided to finally give it a go.

Antharion is a traditional party-based role-playing game, reminding me of the Avernum series from Spiderweb Software. Given that the outdoor areas in Antharion are the same scale as its many dungeon interiors, it reminds me specifically of Avernum IV, which was just recently remade as Avernum 4: Greed and Glory by Spiderweb themselves (as is their wont). As in Avernum IV, players will create a party of four adventurers and march them around the world of Antharion, talking to locals, gathering quests, delving into dungeons, and getting into a lot of fights. This transforms the explorable areas into grid-based battlefields and characters take turns to move, attack, and cast spells. But Antharion also takes some inspiration from another fourth game in a series: Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The player party starts their adventure by breaking out of prison, and the main story kicks off with a town having been laid waste by demonic forces. During the adventure, player characters may turn to theft or even murder of Antharion’s citizens, and be faced with further jail time for their crimes, as featured throughout the Elder Scrolls series. A promising mix of influences, but sadly Antharion does little to capitalize on them.

Things start off well. When creating my party, I wasn’t limited to fantasy staples like elves and dwarves. Instead, I made a party fronted by a wolf-man, backed up by a cat-man archer. One of my spellcasters was undead, the other a Necrophil, a race of magically-summoned creatures who have broken free of their summoners’ will. Sure, there were still humans, elves, and orcs on offer, but I was happy for the chance to make an odder gang of misfits. Although I was annoyed to find that gender makes a mechanical difference during character creation, with men better at physical combat and women better at magic. This is the kind of thing that stupid people will defend with claims that gender choice should “matter”, too idiotic to realize that the choice matters more if it’s free from mechanical impact and is simply a means of player expression. Instead, it’s not a choice at all: I made my fighter and archer men, and my spellcasters women, because that’s what gives them the best numerical stats. If I wanted to make a female fighter, Antharion punishes me with a numerical penalty. Sigh.

When I started the game proper, I was immediately drawn into exploring its world. Antharion achieves something that few games do: it keeps money and resources feeling scarce, nearly all the way to the end. Every barrel, crate, or chest I found was a welcome sight, and I was just as excited to find some food (necessary for healing when resting) or torches as I was a few coins or a ragged cloak that was still slightly better than the tatters my characters were wearing. Scavenging for stuff to keep my party fed and moderately well equipped was a joy, and I gleefully set about pursuing quests and exploring the wilderness. It didn’t hurt that the artwork is nice (although the large-headed characters take some getting used to) and music pleasant, either.

But I soon realized that keeping scavenging fun — through careful balancing of resources — is the only thing that Antharion truly does well. The character creation options promise imaginative world-building that isn’t there. The various provinces that make up the continent of Antharion are as generic as they come: there’s your forested province, a snowy northern promise, swampy southern province, and desert province. Oh, and another forested one that also has beaches. There’s a town in each, full of people who have barely anything to say. Quests are actually rather scarce, with most dungeons simply stumbled upon and explored for their own sake (the aforementioned scavenging) rather than players having a specific reason to go there.

Worse, the dungeons themselves are almost devoid of variety. Every one is a tangle of right-angled corridors, occasionally opening up into a large room with a pack of enemies to fight. Sometimes there are some locked doors to pick (as is typical of such games, none of the locks ever have a key) or secret passages to open if a character has enough Lore skill. Rarely, there are sealed doors that are opened with levers elsewhere. That’s it. Dungeons look different depending on where they are — I especially liked the frosty caves in the north, where chests and barrels are covered in a layer of ice — but they’re all built the same way. The sewer areas, of all things, are the ones that stand out, since they have canals dividing their tunnels with the occasional bridge to spice up the layout. It’s a bad sign when your sewer levels — the most reviled of all game levels — are the most interesting.

Heck, even the early outdoor areas feel like dungeons, with the party forced to travel narrow paths between thick-grown trees or swampy water. And since the auto-map only shows the area immediately around the party, it’s tough to figure out which places remain unexplored. And exploring reveals yet more repetition: barring the occasional cabin or farm far from town, the outdoor areas just have packs of beasts of fight and dungeon entrances to stumble upon. And while it is fun to gather resources, finding equipment is less exciting. Weapons and armor have level requirements, so whenever I found something really good I was unable to use it yet. And by the time my party was high enough level, it wasn’t as impressive anymore. Antharion denied me the joy of stumbling upon a really awesome weapon that makes an immediate difference in combat, restricting me instead to incremental upgrades.

Combat, too, is ultimately disappointing. With everyone taking turns to move on a grid with a set number of action points, I was expecting some tasty tactical maneuvering. But nearly every fight happens in a wide open area, so positioning hardly matters. The party always acts in order from the character in front to the character in back, with no way to defer one’s turn, further limiting options. If, for example, my fighter was afflicted with a magical curse of weakness, I couldn’t have my healer cure him before his attack, because he’s first in line. Except I didn’t create a healer. In an effort to break from tradition, I made a character focused on Gray Magic instead, since its focus on manipulation and support sounded the most unusual. My archer doubled in alchemy to make healing options for everyone, in place of a magical healer. In practice it would have been nice to have someone who could intervene when characters were magically confused or turned into pigs, but I mostly got through just fine.

Every fight went the same way. My fighter would charge the nearest enemy and hit it with his two-handed sword. My archer would shoot the same enemy, hopefully killing it (often without moving from his starting position at all). My gray mage would incapacitate a single enemy, initially with her starting Polymorth spell, later with the Confuse spell. On the rare occasions that there were magic casters among my foes, she might cast Silence on one of them instead, but that has little practical difference to Confuse. Lastly, my black magic specialist would cast some sort of attack spell. These are generally underwhelming, with few opportunities to hit more than one enemy, and damage levels similar to physical attacks. I eventually settled on poison magic, mostly because the Poison Cloud spell actually has a large enough area to catch a few foes at once, and does damage every turn thereafter so I don’t need to cast it again. Further combat turns would play out much the same way.

I was less than halfway through Antharion when my interest started to wane. I could tell it was just going to be more of the same at that point, even if scavenging for supplies still made a dungeon delve diverting. I stubbornly pushed onwards to a disappointing ending, and now wish I hadn’t. The story is generic, full of ancient evils and finding the three fragments of the powerful artifact, things I’ve seen countless times before. Ironically, when I was finally freed of the tree-walls of the early areas and was let loose upon icy plains and desert dunes, I resented their openness. I knew there was nothing out there but some fights and maybe another generic dungeon. Normally I fully explore role-playing games such as this, but I left huge swathes of these provinces untouched as I focused on finishing the main story, just wanting to be done with it.

And yet! For all my complaining, Antharion is worth studying for the way it balances resources. I can’t think of a single other role-playing game where I wasn’t overflowing with cash by the end, leaving oceans of worthless loot untouched on the dungeon floors as I pursued my goal. Such games are always most fun early on, when that loot is actually useful, and finding stuff is still exciting. Antharion keeps that feeling going for far longer than most games manage, holding my interest despite its repetitive combat and boring dungeon layouts. I never quite had enough food, and even ran out completely in a late-game dungeon. Usable equipment is a rare find, and even the lowliest sandals are worth lugging back to town to sell off, so I could save up for the powerful gear sold by the merchants. Even alchemical ingredients are exciting discoveries, feeding the healing and mana-restoring potions that kept my party going in dungeons. Role-playing game developers, take notice. But please couple it with a more interesting game.

I don’t recommend Antharion, then, although if you have a copy it’s worth trying the early sections just to see how well the scavenging is done. I am glad that I can cross it off in my backlog list, at least, and I’m thankful that these days we have far more games like this to choose from. Aside from Spiderweb Software’s output mentioned at the start of this post, we’ve got indie offerings like Balrum, spiritual follow-ups to acclaimed classics like Pillars of Eternity (which recently got a massive update adding optional turn-based combat, instead of the original real-time-with-pause), its pirate-themed sequel, or the villain-centered Tyranny, and officially licensed games like Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous or the smash hit Baldur’s Gate 3. I haven’t even played any of those yet! And there are plenty more out there too. Maybe some of them even manage to stretch out the joy of early scavenging the way Antharion does.