Yaga is Breadcrumbs Interactive’s take on an action RPG with story-focused choice points and procedural level generation that can capture your interest in spite of some unfortunate shortcomings. You play as Ivan, a simple blacksmith that’s lost one of his hands as part of a life or death struggle. He’s since recovered and leaves his small village on order of his ruler in search of great power. His path is influenced by a mysterious witch whose motivations are revealed to the player in parallel, and occasionally perpendicular, to Ivan’s.
When performing actions in the overworld, Ivan’s they are judged by the fates. This is communicated to the player by icons that popup in the overworld or dialog options. These choices contribute to Ivan’s personality as demonstrated by his responses to dialog and through events in the overworld. For example, if the player often lies in conversation that trait will become part of their personality which can have a number of consequences in the narrative.
Ivan gains a reputation with the fates through consistent player choices and that reputation seals his fate which has a number of effects on gameplay.. Ivan can be greedy; as he lies, cheats, and steals his way through the world. He can be noble always heeding the call of justice, no matter the personal inconvenience it may cause him. Many games exhibit a similar player choice, but few admonish consequences for acting out of character as Yaga does.
If you act out of turn, Ivan’s bad luck will increase. This has a number of adverse effects, not least of all losing favor with the witches controlling Ivan’s fate. A windfall of bad luck may cause Ivan to drop his gold, or his weapons to break quicker. All of this culminates into an interesting situation in which the player experiments less with their morality than they might in similar games. I found myself opting for a more consistent approach to choice instead of the wild experimentation I might exhibit in other games.
While punishing the player for diverse choice making may feel counter intuitive, Yaga encourages the player experience Yaga multiple times instead of making an array of conflicting choices throughout a single playthrough. This is demonstrated not only in morality choices and branching story options, but weapon upgrades and procedurally generated levels as well.
Levels typically follow a maze-like structure where there are monsters to fight with an array of weapon types in addition to non-combat events that can assist or challenge the player. Praying to a shrine may bless you with additional health, or it could anger one of the fates and curse you by reducing weapon damage. Whatever the outcome, it’s another instance where Yaga encourages choice, even if that choice is detrimental.
The other area of experimentation is in upgrading weapons and equipment. Throughout your journey you’ll collect ores, items, and enemy parts. All of these can be combined with your standard hammer and a number of other weapons and combat items you find throughout the game. Though fairly subdued in the early hours of the game, by the end of the game you can combine a massive amount of items with wildly varied effects that keep the otherwise simple combat interesting. I found myself mixing and matching all sorts of items just to see what the outcome might be, even if I didn’t actually need the items.
Along with the great visual representation of different weapon enhancements and types, cutscenes are illustrated in a woodblock style that’s great. It looks as though someone made ancient cardboard cutouts and used them as puppets to narrate the story. The voice acting is solid, even if the rhyming dialog can be a bit too much at times. However, the overworld is truly lacking in the visual department.
The monster design is uninspired, often feeling like whatever enemy your encountering is just a generic type. “Oh here’s another flying enemy, here’s another bandit” i found myself thinking. To be clear, the enemy design doesn’t get in the way of the opponents telegraphing their attacks appropriately, but they do stand in sore contrast with the whimsical character design of unique characters and great art style of cutscenes.
Similarly there’s a drastic contrast between how enjoyable it is to mix and match different weapons for interesting combination and then actually using them. Combat feels clunky, there’s no way around it. It’s not so bad that it prohibited me from playing Yaga, but it’s bad enough that I didn’t enjoy actually fighting enemies as I did experimenting with a new weapon. Controlling Ivan never feels as tight and responsive as I’d like and the top-down perspective can make it difficult to see if you’re making contact with enemies. Again, it’s not something that stopped me from enjoying the game, but it did caused me to tire of the experience faster and outright stopped me from replaying it.
At the end of the day, Yaga is a game I’d recommend to anyone who likes a lot of customization in their action RPGs with good art direction and choice driven narrative. If combat and supremely tight controls are what you’re interested in, or if you want a true roguelike with infinite runs and fast paced hack and slash action then I’d take a look at some other titles.
As always, a big thanks to you for reading and to Versus Evil for the review code