Why I sold… Heroes of Terrinoth

This spring I was into adventure games – games about exploring, leveling up, and doing cool adventuring stuff. When I saw this game and I saw the Sadler brothers on the box cover, I was sold. Sadly I discovered adventure games need to do more than the above. Read along as I tell you about my reasoning to sell… Heroes of Terrinoth.

What I said about Heroes of Terrinoth

Here’s what I had to say about this game in the conclusion of my initial review:

Heroes of Terrinoth is a game I like, but one I could love – depending on expansions. I bought this game over Warhammer Quest ACG because I was (am) betting on future expansions, because WQACG is dead (there won’t be anymore expansions), and because I don’t like this particular Warhammer universe (I did grow to like 40K, though). So I’m gonna just leave it at that; this game screams expandability. It feels like a Formula 1 car with a regular car engine inside it – it works and it does what it’s supposed to do, but you know there is more possible than what’s under the hood right now.

Let’s start with the elephant in the room – expansions, and the lack thereof. It’s been close to a year I think since this game released, and nary an expansion in sight. I was initially really positive about this game, but part of that was based on the expansions. Here’s what I wrote in my Addendum:

When you’re driving in your plain car you can easily imagine how quickly a Ferrari would get you from A to B; when you’re washing dishes by hand you wish you had a dishwasher to take all this work out of your hands – literally. (…) Heroes of Terrinoth (…) is ripe for expansions [and I think] this game really deserves it.

The chance of an expansion being released is unlikely at best at this point. Can you judge a game not by what it is, but what it could (or should) be? I don’t think it’s entirely fair to do so. From the other hand: if you feel the game is lacking, whether its flaws can be fixed by an expansion or not, it’s still a lacking game in my experience, and that needs to be addressed.

What I think about the game now

This is what I initially didn’t like about the game:

• Some scenarios put you in a slow death spiral instead of ending it more quickly
• Some games can become a mindless slaughter fest
• It can feel more like a mechanical exercise than an adventure game

I still fully stand by all of the above. In fact, the latter two are the main reasons for my sale. Let’s dive in.

Mindless slaughter fests

In Heroes of Terrinoth, you control a certain number of characters who have four actions available to them (unless those are exhausted): explore, aid, rest, and fight.

You’ll quicky discover that fighting is by far the most important one. Enemies keep piling up! You can try to shake them by moving to a new location, but that doesn’t feel satisfying.

Mechanical exercises at the cost of adventure

Another part of the game that doesn’t feel satisfying is the way the mechanics are implemented. Every action you take follows the same procedure: decide if you want to use success tokens, check your ability card to see how many dice you get to roll, roll, check result, add/remove tokens/damage as needed. Rinse, repeat. It never made me feel like an adventurer whose actions had consequences: I was rolling dice and applying the consequences as a result.

Leveling up as a side-effect

There’s a third reason why I ultimately was displeased with this game. Video games have tought me that my actions have positive consequences: the more I do, the better I get and the more stuff I collect. I level up as a result of my actions, not because the game tells me to.

In Heroes of Terrinoth, the latter is unfortunately true. You level up when the game tells you to, because the Peril track reaches a certain point. There is very little the player can do here.

When you do get to level up, you get to chose one of four cards – but choosing your attack card first is almost always the best choice. I’d call this illusion of choice, and it’s something I doubt expansions could fix. More so, after choosing a particular card, you’re stuck with that class for the rest of the game; the first level gives you a choice of eight different cards (four actions times two for subclasses), but that means the second level has a choice of only three.

You might like it if…

My harsh words don’t mean this game is bad – it’s just not my taste when I thought it would be. As always, your mileage may very. (After all, I sold The 7th Continent which clearly has lots of fans.)

Here are the positives from my review. If anything speaks to you, consider picking up Heroes of Terrinoth:

• puzzly dungeon crawl experience
• exploding dice and success tokens make the dice less random
• each game tells its own story without becoming obtrusive
• various tactical decisions involving traveling and when to take what action
• reasonable variety in quests and how best to approach them

Conclusion

I want to stress that this is not a bad game. I really like the exploding dice and all the options you have as a player for heroes and quests. It just wasn’t my kind of game.

I just hope there will be expansions one way or the other, but the outlook is bleak. With the Sadler brothers contracted by Blacklist Games, and Fantasy Flight Games seemingly having forgotten this game already, I’d make sure first if you like the game as-is enough, and if the mechanical disconnect doesn’t bother you as much as it did me.

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