Ved is an indie with great promise

I admire Ved more than I like it.

That might sound harsh, and there's admittedly a little bit of tough love in there, but I'm not unkind. I think there's a lot to like, even love, about this daring first outing from a trio of indie developers. It's easily one of the most gorgeous games I've played all year.

But Ved is a collection of ideas upon ideas that rarely hold together. It's a story-driven RPG with a tale so superfluous and inert that I couldn't tell you a thing about it. Its dialogue system is limited, and the dialogue itself is full of clunkers, malapropisms, and turns of the phrase that could have done with more localization. The voice acting is all over the place. For every good performance, you get a three that sound like placeholders.

Still, when Ved works, and it does in fits and starts, it's a captivating promise of what this team can do. As a calling card for the future, it delivers on potential, if not in final product.

The story revolves around a young man called Cyrus who, in typical Neil Gaiman fashion, finds himself a stranger in a strange land after a life-threatening experience. Micropolis, the world of magic, is a dangerous place full of new friends and enemies, and a destiny that has called to Cyrus for decades – even if he doesn't know it yet.

Ved is a mix of YA novels, fantasy, steampunk, and even faepunk. On an audiovisual level, it succeeds in every respect. While its influences are obvious, and it borrows heavily from everything available, Ved feels original and invigorating. It's fun, which is so important for a game like this. Especially a story-driven fare that leans heavily on its world building.

The gameplay itself is a mix of turn-based combat, light exploration, and some base-building elements. It smartly utilizes its limited scope to focus, which makes the game feel grander than it actually is. The long development time and numerous reiterations of the gameplay loop really come into effect here. You can tell the developers have had to work long and hard at finding the game within their original idea.

I'm not entirely sold on the combat, which comes off as both repetitive and finicky. You select from a roster of different attacks, spells, and counters, each of which move your character left and right on a two-dimensional battleground. Enemies attack with multiple appendages, which you can cut down to buy some time between rounds.

It's never bad, but it's not particularly fun, either. Instead, I found myself using the story-focused easy-mode far more often just to hurry the pacing along.

Between battles, Ved pours its focus on a choose-your-own-adventure-style gameplay loop. A full playthrough takes around 5 hours, and the story has a commendable amount of alternate routes and endings, so there's incentive to play the story multiple times.

I was happy to see that the choices do feel consequential, and outside of starting a new adventure, there's no chance to go back and redo your mistakes. Unfortunately, the writing is a problem here, once again. Certain choices and dialogue options are frustratingly vague, and I often struggled with deciphering what the game wanted me to do. For autistic gamers, this is not the easiest experience in terms of role-playing.

Elsewhere, cut scenes involve choices that rely on dexterity, magic, or strength. These are determined by a roll of a 20-sided die, yet the system feels superfluous and poorly explained. It appears at random, and compared to the likes of Baldur's Gate 3 or Disco Elysium, it feels like an addition that only takes away from the experience rather than enhances it.

It may sound like I'm down on Ved more than I'm happy with it. That's because Ved has immense promise to it, which makes its stumbles stand out even more.

Make no mistake, I think everyone who likes RPG's or narrative adventures should play Ved. It's one of the better indie titles out this year, and has more than enough of smart gameplay and exciting ideas to warrant its price. It's also a visual treat with one of the best soundtracks to any game this year.

But it's a frustratingly mixed experience, with too many ideas to function coherently. The writing is all over the place, as is the voice acting, and despite over a decade in development, ideas come off as half-baked and unfinished.

Despite this, I enjoyed my time with Ved, and I will play it again before the year is out to enjoy the stellar audiovisual experience once more. I just wish I could rave about it on all accounts, and not with an asterisk hovering over the praise.

It's a great first effort, one that should place the developers on your radar for whatever they make next. Sometimes that's enough.