Avernum: Escape From the Pit is a turn-based Isometric CRPG in where we play as a custom band of four adventurers that have been accused of a crime and sentenced to the underworld known as avernum. Everyone that commits a crime or has simply spoken out against the Empire, which has conquered the known world, end up there, with no known case of anyone ever escaping. It is quite an interesting set up before we are tossed straight into the loneliness of the dark caves you’ll now have to call home and it doesn’t take all that long before someone tries to kill you.
After the tutorial area, you’ll discover that there is a fully functional government down there and all newcomers are given gold & food in the hopes that they will integrate into society instead of turning to crime. The opening town and the world, in general, contains many people to talk to, all having quite a bit of dialogue. Whether you choose to get along with them or steal everything that isn’t nailed down is solely your decision. One can even murder every living soul they come across for the giggles. Even if that is the perfect way to accidentally murder someone critical to the story, you are not punished for doing so. Indeed, you don’t even have to pursue any of the three “game-winning” quest lines if you so choose. You can very well just buy a boat and explore many lands in the hopes of riches.
Once you leave the town, you will find yourself in the over-world portion of the game and can wander out in any direction in search of other cities or dungeons. It is a massive world, filled to the brim with events and things to discover for those that love to explore. Considering we start off with barely anything and there is an actual sense of accomplishment when everyone in your party finally has a pair of shoes, you are going to need every bit of loot you get before you stand a chance entering certain areas. What those areas are you’ll have to discover on your own, but humans are far from the only threat lurking in the shadows of Avernum. And how in the world would there be any light so far underground you may have wondered. Well, even such an inconsequential detail is actually explained in-game. While it severely lacks in the graphics side of things, it does a great job breathing life into the location and its hardships via the text.
You can talk your way out of some fights and avoid dangerous looking situations, but you’ll have to fight eventually. Whether bumping into an enemy on the overworld or being spotted by a foe in a dungeon, this is where the turn-based aspect comes into play. Each of your four party members takes turns moving depending on their order and can use their AP to move around or use items. Attacking will instantly use up all your AP so its best to move beforehand if you planned to do so. Most of the times, you’ll be heavily outnumbered and with so few people, it can be tricky to keep your delicate units from receiving a dagger to the kidneys. That is where your mage comes into play, assuming you picked one. They are extremely efficient at taking out crowds and there is no friendly-fire, meaning you can fling your strongest spells wherever you choose without fear of setting a comrade on a fire.
Magic users have spells that take up MP and all normal fighters will have their own set of skills known as Battle Disciplines. They can perform leg sweeps to cause an enemy to become immobile for a few turns, use an attack to stun, or get rid of any adverse effects via sheer willpower. Using a skill will cause a cool-down to come into effect and you will be unable to perform any other discipline until it recharges. How many turns that takes depends on what you use, but on the flip side, unlike Mages that need MP, there are no limits to how many times you can use your skills. Of course, none of their status effects are guaranteed nor is there any set amount of damage, you are only given an estimate on that front. It is all about the invisible dice roll as to whether you so much as connect a blow, which can open up quite a bit of punishing RNG given that you have such a small party size, making every move you make important.
On the plus side, the more difficult the fight was, the more experience you gain. After enough quests completed or skirmishes won, you will level up and can pour some points into stats as well as abilities. There are only four stats to worry about, them being Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, and finally Intelligence. Even if you pump all your points into one of them, you will randomly receive a free boost into another to keep your characters viable despite bad management. Where the difficult choices come is choosing where to spend your ability points. You can set them into becoming more efficient with certain weapons, lock-picking, or being able to heal some health and magic after each battle. There are quite a bit of options to choose from and many of them are shared between your party. So say you give each character a single lock-picking point, they are all combined into one grand total when said skill is in use.
Every three or so levels you’ll also be able to choose a Trait. These range from things such as being able to charge 10% more for items you sell to how much armor you can wear. What you do not gain by leveling up however, are any spells. These are learned in one of two ways. Either paying with cold hard cash or learning them from a tome, which in turn needs a certain amount of points invested into Arcane Lore in order to even understand how to read it. Each spell can be upgraded up to three times and the only way to learn the third, most powerful version are from those hidden tomes. Speaking of using a mage or any ranged character in general, there is one huge flaw to the combat. If an attack cannot reach, he will automatically move to a position where he thinks he can. More often than not, this means your ranged fighter will hoof it straight into the front-lines and to rub salt in the wound, he may run out of action points before even being able to attack.
As you may imagine, having a Mage run straight past your well-armored warriors and into a group of enemies is hardly a sound tactical choice. There is no way to undo actions either, pretty much guaranteeing you’ll lose one of your four party members through no fault of your own, and then have to trek all the way to a friendly town to heal him. Some sort of visual representation to what your line of sight is would have done wonders. Or better yet, do not take control away from the player in a tactical game. Unfortunately, this is a recurring theme, that being the lack of information Avernum provides is a constant annoyance, specifically in the UI department. Things such as how many skill points in total does a party have for an ability, to name an example. In order to find out, you need to navigate through various menus on a character to character basis and then add them up yourself. Small things like the inability to use your mouse wheel to scroll will also drive you mad.
It is a sub-par UI, to say the least, and considering that this title is, in fact, a remaster of a remaster on a 1995 title called Exile, this becomes a bitter pill to swallow. There have been other changes to streamline it, like your party no longer needing to eat while moving on the over-world and healing now being done by stepping into a town instead of resting or purchasing a bed in the inn. The weird part is that they are still in the game but both effectively useless now. Food can heal a bit of health or you can sell any you come across at the very least, however, renting a room serves no purpose whatsoever. It all feels pretty janky and that’s a good way to describe Avernum in general. There is nowhere near enough character sprites for the world they were going for, with even extremely important people like the king looking exactly the same as many others NPCs. At one point a person was said to be a child, which came as some shock given that there are not any sprites for children so from our view it is a grown man. There is only one track of music in the game, and that only plays upon booting it up. This is indie even by indie standards.
And yet none of that kept me from playing it for 57 hours, making it my fourth most played game on Steam. I enjoyed the setting and more so I enjoyed the exploration this game offers. There is something around seemingly every corner, with the sight of an unexplored area causing one to want to drop right out of your real life obligations, despite how much time you’ve spent playing already. This is a world so scarce in resources that being told that someone has a piece of steel armor makes you immediately think twice about messing with him, and randomly finding a steel sword is akin to stumbling upon Excalibur. A large portion of the game will see you fighting tooth and nail with crude, bent weapons, and in my case, having my tank character charge into battle without trousers for the first dozen hours.
It was an incredibly satisfying gradual progression of trying to arm my four units and selling off what I can to learn spells that all cost quite a pretty penny. Simply buying a health potion costs a fortune, not to mention the elixirs that allow you to instantly revive a fallen character on the spot. It causes nearly every discovery to feel valuable and makes you think twice about when you use an item. Best of all is that not every event is a good one, leading to some risk & reward scenarios where you don’t even get anything out of your life-threatening ordeal. The combination of loot and exploration is very potent in Avernum and will likely be your main driving force. If you are more into story or your choices mattering, this won’t offer much on that front. There are some interesting characters and the lore/politics are solid as well, yet it lacks an overall narrative. This is due to having three completely different motives you can pursue in where you can try to find some way to escape, learn to make the most of your new home, or finding some way to strike against the Empire despite the ensuing consequences to those around you.
Or you can choose to follow none of the previously stated “game-winning” scenarios and spend all your time adventuring. I put game-winning in quotes because reaching the end of one of the three quest lines does not matter in the slightest. You can actually keep playing afterward finishing one and even do the other two as well on the same play-through, which makes no sense plot-wise. This ties back into what I previously said about it not being a title for those that crave meaningful choices. Nothing you do matters. You can kill an important diplomat representing the Empire and immediately go tell that to the mayor of the city what you just did. She will understandably freak out and state how she needs to report this situation to the king of Avernum right away. Talk to her again and you tell her once more, to which she replies exactly the same as the last. You can keep repeating that cycle for eternity and nothing new will happen. The quests you undertake are the same way with none containing any domino-like effects for your actions. They are simply a “k thx” and done affair once you turn them in.
Avernum is a game where one needs to focus on the journey instead of any destination. You are encouraged to set off on your own and explore, instead of making a b-line right through its main quests. Even with something like the now standard fast travel function you will have to work for it. First, you have to go to the Mage’s Tower to receive that right and if you’ve found any before doing that, well hopefully you wrote down where they were. It must have been interesting to decide what to change in the now 23-year-old title this is based off and in the end, I’d say it landed slightly more to the casual side, but not by much. It is accessible yet still pretty archaic for any newcomer to the genre. Avernum: Escape From the Pit is incredibly charming, full of humor, and contains a ton of content for those willing to look past its flaws. Also, I encountered a random spider that kissed my ankle then ran off giggling, 0/10, this whole hobby.
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