Warhorse's 2018 role-playing game is set in Bohemia in 1403 and contains no dragons, no magic and no fantasy races. You are Henry, a blacksmith's son with no combat training, and the game insists on that: swordplay is a directional system with five attack angles, clinches and a master-strike counter that takes hours of practice with a trainer to land reliably, and early fights against a single armoured soldier are genuinely unwinnable. Reading is a skill you must learn. Sleep, food, hygiene and your clothes' condition all affect how people treat you. Quests are unusually willing to fail - miss a window because you slept too long and the questline resolves without you. Its research is the selling point, with real castles, real politics and a monastery sequence that makes you live as a monk to an obsessive degree. It launched heavily bugged, has since been thoroughly patched, and the sequel in 2025 refined nearly everything. Nothing else on the market is this committed to being difficult and mundane.
Metacritic
