DROVA, the land of legends. The land that people of earth yearn for. This is a pipe dream for your playable character and the many inhabitants of your world—that is, until a discovery of a stone is made that could potentially connect you to this land where no one can go hungry and a place where the sun shines gallantly. Supposedly anyway, no one has ever seen it… Until you do! Developer Just2D Interactive and publisher Deck13 Spotlight take the player to a land that is spoken of so highly, giant blood-spitting flies are just waiting for you at the end of the rainbow to eat you whole.
Welcome to ‘Drova – Forsaken Kin’, a 2D top-down action role-playing game that takes on inspiration from older computer RPG titles. Choices matter, you’ll do plenty of searching, and you’ll likely die a lot. Drova is impressive thanks to how tight its world design is and how it fills it with things to do.
DROVA starts us off building up the world you come from. The land of legends is sought after and there’s a chance for you and an ally to slip in and potentially make your way out of the current life you lead. But things go wrong, your mates dead, and now you’re in possession of a stone that you have no idea about. Vile beasts seem to sit at every corner of Drova and they’ll be more than ready to kill you. You’ll need to defend yourself and very quickly you’ll have your first sword and shield. In Drova, players will have a multitude of weapon types, magic and physical, that they’ll be able to use throughout the course of the game. As an action title, dodging is crucial, and the game is quite friendly with the number of i-frames (frames in which your character is immune to damage while the animation plays out) but blocking will do you plenty of good against the many beasts and human baddies you encounter.
The “Land of Legends” as we should now call it is brutal. Besides enemies that are quick to kill, the game will give the bare minimum directions needed to explore. You’re on your own to procure weapons, meet the people of Drova and get help or make enemies of them, and the like. Drova is effectively split up between two opposing factions: the Remnants and the Nemetons—each with their own idea of what Drova ought to be. One appears savage and ruthless while the other seeks greens and order. Both will be a source of help, but you can only choose to be with one in a playthrough, though of course your story course will be to pursue the truth behind the stone that you carry. The people of Drova make do with what they have, but you’ll find them struggling all over with the trial that is survival.
Speaking of folks that’ll help you, Drova’s approach to leveling and world exploration is far more traditional than modern RPGs. As you defeat monsters and finish quests, grabbing sweet experience points and level up in the process, you can’t just spec the “learning points” you’ve acquired through leveling. You’ll need to find the right people to use these points, and they won’t always be willing to teach you. Do their quests, get on their good side, and you’ll be able to learn specific survival and attack skills you won’t find elsewhere. Learning points can also be found out in the overworld while exploring Drova, so you’ve another reason to explore off the beaten path (even if it means a potential quick death).
Forsaken Kin’s world is alive. Quite literally, as inhabitants walk from town to town, doing their own things, and they’ll come in contact with enemies and fight them off (and it’d do you some good to join in to help ’em!). The same goes for beasts—there’s plenty of infighting out in the swamps and any fallen enemy will become permanent mainstays in the overworld. Anything you kill or is killed in front of you will stay dead for good and it’s that sort of touch that I love about Drova. The game does its best to chain the player to its world via choices that can be made through quests and combat. You don’t always need to pursue the latter and the former is entirely up to how you’re feeling—but Forsaken Kin will always try to nudge you to the righteous path of sorts. Not all the quests are very interesting though, especially some of the main quest paths like in Chapter 2 with the tree weirdos. Sometimes I found myself bored enough that I simply walked away and ran towards a different part of the map to find something else to do.
Drova’s map is not big. Matter of fact, so long as the path is clear, you could walk from one end to the other in a few minutes. There’s no fast traveling, but once you’ve walked a road, you’ll usually be able to backtrack with little issue. Forsaken Kin relies on drawn maps instead of a dynamic one you typically see in most modern RPGs and even then, the game is nice enough to give you a pointer on where you are on the map. But otherwise, you’ll need to rely on the environment and swap between the map viewer which honestly could get annoying on a controller. Since opening the user menu pulls up your character stats and inventory first, having to scroll to the maps and back just to make sure you’ve not strayed off a path can be a bit frustrating. There’s a level of tedium players will need to keep in mind when playing Drova, both in quests and some missing quality-of-life that can get in the way of some otherwise solid adventuring—especially if you roam off into the wilderness.
While I’m covering that, Forsaken Kin, just like the games of yore that it draws inspiration from, is all about finding things and then either reporting back to the quest giver or killing whatever is in your way. Not that there aren’t unique encounters in Drova (and boy are the cool ones really special), but I think hours of my playtime were definitely spent looking for characters or objects I couldn’t really see or find. A problem with Drova is that folks you talk to rarely describe people that they’ll send you over to. And while the game’s art style is beautiful as it is gritty, but there’s not a human single sprite that I could pull from memory if you asked me to do so. When I picked Nemeton in my playthrough, I spent hours walking through their little haven just trying to advance quests. It doesn’t help that non-playable characters also have routines and sadly, you might just end up wandering around a whole bunch trying to advance the main quest alone.
And as I mentioned, dying in Drova is common—therefore you should really be saving a whole bunch. But I encountered an issue many times where I’d reload a save and get stuck at the loading screen, forcing me to restart the client. Mind, I’ve been playing Forsaken Kin on and off only over the last two weeks and it seems the issue still persists since its launch in mid-October. Considering how many things are likely to one-shot you, having to restart the client multiple times to progress or pray that my death didn’t bring about a softlock was quite frustrating.
Despite bugs and some questing that isn’t all too interesting, Drova drives home a sort of old-school design that is simple, fun, and frustrating when the going gets tough. This is a damn good 2D RPG that action and computer role-playing game fans won’t want to miss out on. ∎
Drova - Forsaken Kin
Played on
Xbox Series X
PROS
- Solid old-school style action RPG.
- Drova is alive thanks to quest choices, infighting, and world imprints.
- Great presentation.
CONS
- Questing can be dull at times.
- Visibility and bugs.
