VED was provided by Fulqrum Publishing for review. Thank you!
With a name like VED, you're not able to glean much from just the title, so what exactly is VED? Well, to use the developer's own words, it's a hand-drawn, story-driven RPG with turn-based combat. And it's one of the more unique games I've had to review as a video game journalist.
The basic premise of VED is that there exist two worlds: the one in which humans reside and another magical world where spirits, demons, and other fantastical creatures live. Our protagonist, Cyrus, can traverse between them. By your dialogue choices, you'll then decide how the story progresses, which faction Cyrus will end up with, and who his friends will be.
VED falls into an interesting position where it's quite hard to define exactly what genre it is. It's heavily story-driven, with a good chunk of time spent in cutscenes in the Human World with voiced dialogue and critical choices to be made, which will affect the story and your relationships with various people and factions. It plays quite similarly to a visual novel.
But you will be teleported to the Magic World at points in the story, introducing more RPG and rogue-lite elements to the game. When you are teleported, you are confronted with your "base," a small village run by Troglodytes. Defeating enemies in the Magic World grants you Energy, which you can spend to build structures in the village, which grants Cyrus new abilities to use in battle. It's very basic, and a simple level-up system could have easily done the same here, but it's quite neat to see the village being built up and interacting with some of the Troglodytes there.
Once you've set your abilities in the base, you can head out into the Magic World proper, where the game allows you to travel along branching paths with events and battles. The events are straightforward and will include choices that rely on your Magic, Strength, or Dexterity abilities, done in a very Dungeons & Dragons-esque manner with a D20 die.
The combat in the game is entirely turn-based and relies on the abilities you selected while at your base. This is the most interesting part of VED, with your player character changing position on the battle grid with each move. You need to think tactically about what attacks you will use and in what order. Abilities must be put in 1 of 4 positions, and some abilities only work in certain positions. Hence, you need to work out what position an ability will put you in so you know what abilities you can use next. The game's difficulty is also pretty tough.
There is an option to enable a "Story Mode" difficulty, which makes combat incredibly easy, but as the combat is the highlight of the game for me, I wouldn't recommend that you use it. This option also makes it almost impossible for dice rolls to fail.
Unfortunately, the story in VED fell pretty flat for me. The game places you in a world with very little world-building and quickly introduces the game's 4 factions without establishing much of a backstory. It's all surface-level stuff, and it's hard to decide what faction you wish to support when you don't know the reasons behind their actions for a good portion of the game. You aren't even sure why Cyrus should care about any of this.
Pacing is a huge issue with VED's storyline, with remarkably little information presented to the player at certain points, even when crucial choices need to be made. Then the game loves to lore-dump you with a several-minute conversation explaining a ton of backstory with dialogue that cannot be slowed down or paused. It's just a bit too much, and it feels like the developers didn't know as and when to give the player certain information that they had prepared. The game is shorter, and I think the developers had a bigger story to tell, but only a few hours to fit it all in.
The game also suffers from being a bit disjointed, with Cyrus able to switch sides between chapters and the characters seemingly being perfectly fine with it. It creates a confusing situation to try and figure out whose side they are on. For example, I could side with a faction late in the game despite having terrible relationship stats with their leader. Even the timestamps when the scene changes make no sense, often using a 12-hour clock, others using a 24-hour clock, and using AM or PM is also sometimes incorrect.
Cyrus is also supposedly meant to be blind, or at least severely vision impaired, which is why I presume the human world is presented in such a bland manner, and the magic world is so vibrant, as he has his sight in the magic world. Despite this, however, Cyrus' vision impairment almost seems to come and go as and when it's convenient to the plot for him to have the issue or not.
Cyrus himself remains an enigma. He is teleported to the Magic World early on in the game and seems remarkably chill. Fighting demons, meeting a race of Troglodytes whom he helps build a village, and then returning home to the Human World and proceeding to go and book a job interview. It's just a standard day for Cyrus! Just who is this guy? It's hard to care about a character who seems hard to relate to.
Some of the dialogue also borders on... being rather strange. A conversation between Cyrus and a woman a few chapters in is quite cringe-inducing to listen to, and although the woman does comment that Cyrus is being a bit weird, she seems far more ok with it than anyone I know would be. It makes Cyrus come across as a bit obsessive, and he's like it with other female characters, too, and you start to wonder just what his backstory makes him the way he is. But just who Cyrus is is never explained to the player.
All of this isn't helped by the fact that the game's voice acting at some points is... just not very good. I thought that the voices were AI-generated at first, so I went and checked the game's credits and saw that several different people were listed as voice actors for the game. But, the voices distracted me from enjoying the game's story. Emphasis is frequently placed on the wrong words, some words (and the subtitles) are spoken/written incorrectly, and the intonation in the sentence structure can often be wrong as if the voice actor sounds like they intended to say more when the sentence has finished.
It's possible the voice actors were reading a script and aren't native English speakers, as sometimes, the subtitles are written in poor or incorrect English, and the voice actors say it word for word despite it being quite a glaring grammatical error to a native speaker. The game is also available in Russian voices, possibly voiced better than English if you can understand it. You can also disable voices in the settings menu, but it's paired with the rest of the sound effects, sadly.
Visually, the game has an interesting hand-drawn art style. It really shines in the Magic World, with vibrant colors, beautiful visuals, and animations for the combat. Sadly, the Human World is depicted as very drab, almost presented in a monochromatic style. I would assume this is done to portray Cyrus' view of the two worlds, but I find it harms the world-building even further when you can't see the world you're in. The title screen depicts Micropolis as a neon-lit city, but you won't find a neon light anywhere once you're in the game.
VED is a story-driven game where the story just lacks the power to pull the rest of the game with it. The combat is fun, but it's a minor part of the game, and I'm not even 100% sure why we're in this magical world fighting all these fantastical creatures and building a village for the Troglodytes. We didn't even know any of this existed 24 hours ago! That sentence alone pretty much sums up VED. It's a solid premise for a storyline, but the game rushes the story along and provides only shallow explanations for everything.
VED is a bit of an interesting one on the Steam Deck. It has excellent controller support, so you have nothing to worry about. The game does allow you to select 1280x800 as a resolution in the settings, but it seemingly just runs at 1280x720 with black borders anyway. At one point, the game did seem to randomly change to 1280x800 after a transition, but it scaled incorrectly and cut off some UI elements, so I recommend you just play at 1280x720.
We're setting the SteamOS frame rate limit to 60, and we can get away with a TDP Limit of 8W.
VED has a simple "Graphic Quality" option in the options menu, which we'll set to "High."
With these settings, the game should hold 60 FPS for the vast majority of play. There are slight dips here and there, but given the nature of the game, they don't affect play at all.
The power draw is kept pretty low. When the game is just showing a pre-rendered scene, such as the many story sequences in the game, expect a draw of around 7W. In the gameplay segments, such as the turn-based battles, the power draw rises to around 10-11W. Very rarely, it can spike up to 13W.
Temperatures are low, mostly in the 55-60C range, and the fan never becomes audible during play.
There are no accessibility options in VED, although all dialogue is subtitled. You can also enable a "Story Mode" difficulty, making the game's combat much easier.
VED has an interesting premise both for the storyline and for the gameplay mechanics. Sadly, the story suffers from poor pacing and inconsistencies. It really feels like the game would benefit from being a slightly longer adventure, not an 8-hour one, but I suppose the developers have to draw the line at some point. Poor voice acting and somewhat repetitive, if well-drawn, art also let the game down for its world-building.
One thing you can't fault VED on, however, is how it runs on the Steam Deck. It provides an essentially flawless experience with great battery life, even on the highest settings. Controller support is also top-notch here.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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VED is an interesting, though flawed story-driven RPG, it's a little on the short side and the voice-acting isn't the best, but it plays great on the Steam Deck.
