Bound by Flame

Bound by Flame is an action RPG with dark fantasy elements, mixing engaging combat with a choice driven story.
I’m finishing it for the second time ,the story is interesting, the combat is solid, and the characters are great, though the voice acting is a bit weak.
Don’t pay attention to the negative reviews, you should definitely give this game a try.
6.5/10

story game > online game
is this enough ?
story is good
fighting style is little bit lame
gadget and magic and other stuffs are fine
but honesty this game is billion times better than nintendo trashes

Challenging game unfortunately very short(not enough content).
I'm going to ramble in the next part
I played this game back in 2014 when it was released and wow did Spiders want to create a sadistic game.
Inflicting frustration on the player.
The game has an absurdly high difficulty spike in the start. Depending on your build and patience it get's easier towards the end and THEN there's the final boss fight against the demon.
Damn it's tough, and that's on medium difficulty. I don't know what supermen managed to beat it on the highest difficulty but they have my respect. I could not finish the game back then. I decided to buy and play it on steam in 2025.
I said the game is short in the sense, there is only three acts, meaning three regions to explore. You CANNOT go back to previous regions once completed. The game allows you to farm enemies in each region and I would advise new players to do so.
Why do I recommend this game ?
The combat can be fun, the story, companion's, game lore and certain NPC's are interesting and well designed.
The problems I have with it are thus:
Very little content. The game is short but considering how easily the player can die, that's the ONLY thing padding out the gameplay hours. I don't understand if they wanted to copy and combined Dark Souls with a Bioware game into one, but they succeeded. Looking back now, I WISH they added more regions and chapters.
The game could have been a huge success!
The other problem is there is NO WAY to re-spec your skill tree. Some skills and abilities are so useless, like the pyromancer's final ability. A useless flame wisp that sends 4-6 orbs of fire before disappearing for about 3/4 of my mana ? F off.

If you're like me and you take pleasure in games with balancing issues, 'janky' combat and serviceable writing, then this might be right up your alley. There's a lot of games like Bound by Flame that come to mind such as the Risen franchise for example, that have undeniable glaring and frustrating issues but have somewhat become part of their charm over time.

Bound by Flame looked pretty good when it came out, and still looks pretty good today. The music and sound effects are done very well and fit the tone they were going for and there are a number of likeable characters in the game despite the writing being fairly awful.

There's a good game here if you can get past some of the combat jank and poor writing. It had some good things going for it at the time.

My therapist says I need to "diversify my gaming interests" but jokes on her - I'm switching therapists to one who appreciates true art! The moment I booted up this DIVINE CREATION, I knew my life would never be the same.
Forget Mass Effect's boring paragon/renegade nonsense - THIS is how you do character development! Forget Witcher, forget Dragon Age - Bound by Flame has the most EMOTIONALLY DEVASTATING romance arcs! Every choice matters! Do you embrace the flames and become a flaming badass demon lord, or stay human and... okay, the human path is less cool but STILL AMAZING!
People who complain about the combat "feeling clunky" clearly have NO TASTE and probably think Call of Duty is peak gaming. I bought the soundtrack separately and listen to it during my daily 6-hour meditation sessions. My cat is named Vulcan and responds only to BBF dialogue quotes.
If you don't like Bound by Flame, you simply don't understand TRUE ART. This game is for intellectuals, for people who appreciate NUANCED STORYTELLING and aren't spoon-fed their entertainment like BABIES. Spiders Studio created a MAGNUM OPUS and history will vindicate this masterpiece!
BUY THIS GAME OR LIVE WITH ETERNAL REGRET!!!
P.S. - Already pre-ordered 12 copies of any potential sequel. Spiders Studio, if you're reading this, I'm available for marriage proposals or executive consultant positions.
UPDATE: Just found out there's a sequel in development.
UPDATE 2: There is no sequel. I may never recover from this news. Still a good game.

I'm trying all Spiders games by release date and this is definitely my favorite up until now. It's nothing incredible, but for it's price and length this is a good game to fit inbetween bigger titles.

Story is simple but enjoyable, especially because it gives you some hints in the early stages that you can put together to understand stuff that is gonna be confirmed/reveal later, I always find stories like these more engaging as I rather understand stuff on my own than have the game exposition it to me, this said the pieces of the puzzle are pretty explicit and easy to put together.
I enjoyed the characters at first, but by Part 3, which is the last section of the game, their character progression and impact in the story really falls flat imo.

Combat is fun for the most part, my style revolved around using fire magic to buff myself while using the quick stance to attack swiftly and dodge enemy attacks. The gameplay is dynamic, much smoother than Mars: war Logs, Spider's previous game, and is challenging enough to be fun without being hard. Again, it falls a bit flat towards thh end of the game, where you repeatedly fight the same bosses and everything just turn into sponges with no new interesting attack patterns to learn. The final Boss fight is quite spectacular and definitely enjoyable tho, although a bit chaotic (the opposite of the fight prior to it, which sucked).

Soundtrack has some cool, memorable pieces and usually really set the vibe, there's only one song I didn't like (guess where it was? Yes, Part 3).

Setting is nothing special but cool, even if the graphics were already old at the time of release, but I guess playing this a decade later doesn't negatively impact my experience as much. Also enjoyed the level design, nothing special again, Thieves had deeper level design a decade earlier, but it still had some depth. But guess what? again. it falls flat during Part 3, where a level is basically a small, linear and boring quadrant mirrored four times.

The coolest part of this game is definitely enemies' visual design: it combines sexuality and body horror in a way that really fits the mood (for once, this doesn't fall flat towards the end of the game)

Oh boiiii, the Devs CLEARLY didn't finished the game on the hardest difficulty and said: "Yes, this final boss seems fair and balanced. Release it!"

Aside from that, I decided to buy and try this old beautuy from my childhood now that I am older and I just wanted to ask. Spider, why are you doing this?

You gave us a goth-ice baddie and proceeded to lock her in the bad route of the game? Shame on you, the game is fine overall as it follows Spider formula of a dark fantasy RPG with the same gameplay if you played any of the devs previous games liek Mars: War Logs, Techomancer or GreedFall, if you liked them you will like this one.

As one of the 2.6% of people that finished it on the hardess difficulty and goodest ending out there I had to say, it's a good game. I will still be salty about Edwen though.