After months of silence, Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms, the role-playing game Gamera Interactive is finally complete!

Game Interactive Finally one step away from success: After years of hard work, the Italian software house tackling the daring and repeatedly delayed Alaloth: Champions of The Four Kingdoms is on the brink. It’s great news because this very special role-playing game, while remaining a standalone project, represents one of the most important and suffering Italian productions in circulation. Alaloth has a weight of its own, as it shouldn’t cost a little to do so, especially when you add in all the misadventures the development team and the game have had to face just to stay a step away from the game’s release date.

We tell you whyAlaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms preview.

purebred DNA

As the release date approaches, we were lucky enough to spend two long hours with Alaloth: Champions of The Four Kingdoms and its supposed father two weeks ago. Alberto Bell, is ready to tell us every detail of a project that he started to dream of since childhood and then dreams of realizing. The inspiration for Alaloth is clear: the major RPGs of the golden age of Bioware and Obsidian are undoubtedly the most visible ones, but above all it is the cult game Moonstone, released for the Amiga and PC in 1991 to secure the Gamera title. It is an interactive, very special and somewhat original identity, as it has not been used for almost three decades.

Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight is actually a not very successful game for a number of factors, including its lack of distribution in the United States. But it’s yet another blow it has taken due to the graphical violence that has prevented it from making the leap to consoles, where the industry and the public are moving fast. In short, Moonstone paid the price for strict rules on violence that were broken and rewritten by Mortal Kombat and Night Trap only a year later.

Fortunately, Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms doesn’t take the same risks or even the same degree of violence as Moonstone, but it’s very close in terms of atmosphere. This fantasy extremely fantasybut at the same time, Alaloth invents rules to stay on the ground in terms of play while Alaloth stays on the ground.

As mentioned, we haven’t tried the game firsthand yet, but as its Steam debut is imminent (and hopefully later on other platforms as well), review code should be coming soon. As a result, we don’t yet know how to tell you in detail what the feel will be like once with the pad in your hand (or a more classic mouse and keyboard), but we can still tell you about something. battle system simple, but directly dominated by our skill with commands as well as mathematics; we will be able to choose between faster or more powerful attacks, dodge at the right time to avoid the opponent’s blows. Fortunately, Alaloth is free of the somersaults that characterize many modern action RPGs.

A little RPG and a little board game

Alaloth, of course, allows the company of two other NPCs who can help us in battles. However, their support must be requested at the beginning of each level, near the bonfire, where we can also decide what equipment to bring with us, which is not easy given the deliberately limited slots. Each achievement will bring us money and loot, plus the inevitable experience points that we can spend on growing our hero.

There structure The character of Alaloth is twofold: on the one hand, we have a huge fantasy world outlined in a gorgeous game board, where our character will appear as a pawn and we can move him between numerous points of interest, and on the other hand, the game will return to resemble a more classic RPG, from the top of the second representation with an image. This is where we can explore different cities or explore and enter more or less challenging dungeons where one of the four jewels needed to defeat the demigod Alaloth, who casts his shadow on the world of Plamen and threatens destruction. hidden.

storm flows

Gamera Interactive prefers to let you go completely, not among those who like to take you away from the game towards the end. Free From the start: free to explore, free to develop, and, of course, free to die in the worst way possible. The large map used as the board game board and many unique and seasonal events will take care of the rest. But be careful, your character won’t be the only one looking for these “shards” needed for the final battle unless you remove them from the early game options.

Other heroes They will move on the AI-managed board, face their adventures, and if you already have some jewels, they may even come looking for you with a sword to your throat to rob you of precious and determined loot. And of course you can do the same.

when you stay map General and once you’ve decided where to move, the game will progress slowly through the fantasy calendar of ten months of thirty days each. The more we play, the stronger Alaloth gets, putting us against more difficult enemies to defeat. But the weather will also affect the tasks that we can find at cyclical events such as city fairs, holidays, moon phases, and considering the Moonstone references, it is better to be very careful with the full moon.

bloodthirsty rivals

it’s in the game hundreds of characters It is extremely difficult to interact and find them all in one game. Alaloth was originally designed to be replayable: pieces will be randomly placed in the world to defeat the threat in each adventure, and as opponents the game will be able to choose from more than forty characters, each with very special characteristics, and you can also encounter in multiplayer mode, so all the heroes in the game are human players.

Like all indie games, Alaloth has gods limits: multiplayer will initially be local only, so players must all be in front of the same screen. The information is also very rich, mostly written by the legendary Chris Avallone, and the graphics don’t look at all what you’d expect from this kind of production. Even with the music, the team has undoubtedly done a commendable job.