Frayed Knights: The Skull of S'makh-Daon Review
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Another annoyance is the presence of random enemy encounters and patrols. While I understand the appeal of ambushes and the need to keep players on their toes, it can be extremely frustrating to clear out an entire dungeon only to end up facing down an especially difficult enemy encounter just as you near the exit, and end up dying because of it. The endgame ratchets this problem up to eleven, with the most difficult enemies ambushing you incessantly, and making what should be an enjoyable build-up to the conclusion a rather tedious slog.Tying in with this, a particular spell obtained late in the game, Rest Stop, effectively removes all consequence of the Endurance mechanic, since it allows your party to regain all Endurance with no reduction to its maximum level, and no chance of enemy detection, unlike regular resting. Considering the sheer number of random encounters in the endgame, it feels to me like this spell was added to reduce frustration... but breaking one system to make up for another design choice isn't really a good thing in my eyes. Thankfully, this complaint is at least only relevant in the final stage of the game.
There are also times when Frayed Knights is very poor about communicating certain information. This includes everything from the lack of precise data on the influence of attributes, or the damage spells do, to more serious issues. As an example, late in the game I had to solve a puzzle revolving around the flipping of switches. I messed around for close to an hour trying to figure out how to flip them correctly, but couldn't find any clues as to how to proceed. It was only after backtracking and finding a well-hidden room tucked away in the corner of a building that I was able to find the solution, and there was otherwise no signposting or hint for me to even find this necessary information. I can fully foresee players with less patience giving up in this kind of situation. Sometimes, this lack of guidance works to the game's advantage, making exploration much more rewarding, but in a few cases like this, it can be annoying to simply have to keep wandering aimlessly until eventually you bump into the information you need, especially when it's required to finish the game.
Conclusion
In spite of these flaws, however, Frayed Knights does something that so few RPGs do these days: it provides a real sense of hard-earned progression, enjoyable quests that interweave with one another, tactical and challenging turn-based combat with a huge amount of depth and few obvious exploits or problems, exploration which not only provides good rewards, but revolves around player ingenuity and persistence rather than simply following obvious clues and a quest compass, and, of course, it also doesn't take itself too seriously. When getting deep into the game's mechanics and presentation, it's easy to come across a few weak points, and, were this not an indie game, those problems would be much harder to forgive. For a one-man labor of love, however, I'm willing to give Frayed Knights a pass on a lot of these issues, especially because so many other things about the game are done so well.
The bottom line on Frayed Knights: The Skull of S'makh-Daon is that it provides a great, traditional, and well-designed CRPG experience, the likes of which we rarely see these days. Players who are used to the polish and streamlining more modern RPGs, and who don't take kindly to the game's less serious tone and style may not find themselves drawn into the game, but the underlying mechanics are, provided you enjoy combat and dungeon crawling, some of the best I've seen in years. I think fans of some of the genre's classics, like Might & Magic, Wizardry, and Betrayal at Krondor will really appreciate Jay Barnson's tribute to old-school CRPGs, and, perhaps, it will also convince some newer fans of the genre to get into the classics as well. My hope is that Jay will take a close look at the strong and weak points with his first outing, and do his best to resolve the problems while building on the strengths. For now, while I can't recommend it to absolutely everyone (so play the demo and check it out for yourself!), Frayed Knights is, quite simply, the kind of game a lot of CRPG fans have been waiting for.
