Sword & Sorcery: Immortal Souls

Sword & Sorcery: Immortal Souls is one of the very few Kickstarters I sincerely regret not picking up. And I do not say that merely because it is hard to find now, or because there is a lasting sense that it never received the support it deserved. I say it because, for me, it is by far the best dungeon crawler of its generation.

At its core, it has a very solid dungeon-crawling system. The difficulty of the base game is properly balanced: it does not pat you on the head, but it does not throw you into a wall of unfairness either. You roll your dice, fight to survive, and the game gives you that honest, straightforward feeling that every battle carries weight.

Despite being cooperative, it never turned into that hippy “we are all friends, walking hand in hand” thing that usually puts me off. There is proper brawling, there is tension when someone dies, and of course there is the highest form of group solidarity: everyone rushing to loot their corpse before anybody else can. Yes, I know, a bakery collapsed — but we laughed a lot.

The shame is that Gremlin Project did not support it in production as much as it should have, nor did Ares promote it with the force it deserved. If some Asmodee had grabbed it, it would probably cost 20–30 euros more, but the whole planet would be playing it and we would not be waiting forty Turkish years for expansions and extra characters. The damn thing is genuinely worthwhile.

Thankfully, we did not stop there: as a palate cleanser, we followed it up with a game of Hexpanse.