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

A somewhat janky, somewhat dated, but definitely engaging AA RPG.
The good:
The story. Yes, it's basically another "chosen one" narrative, but enough time is taken with the writing for the worldcrafting to be juicy enough. I like the Venom-esque conceit of your demon 'friend', as well.
The voice-acting for NPCs is pretty decent overall. I didn't cringe all that much.
The ending. I did a little research on how to get the usual "good ending", but it really wasn't that hard at all to achieve.
Craft or brew anything on the fly. Every game should have that feature.
Save anywhere (as long as you're not actively in battle).
Difficulty levels. I recommend the easiest because combat isn't Dark Souls level, but it can be rough. I died rather often.
There is encumbrance, but the only penalty is that you can't sprint. And your normal walking speed is pretty brisk.
The meh:
I chose the female protagonist option and wow, her line readings early on can be pretty awkward and wooden. She does seem to improve as the story progresses (I can't speak for the male voice - look up a YouTube walkthrough if you're that interested).
Combat is a bit on the jank side. You can level up three attributes: great sword fighting, twin dagger fighting and pyromancy. No sword and shield option, no bow. You do have bomb traps and a crossbow available, but I rarely used them (until the very end). Twin dagger is definitely the most fun, but healing is weirdly linked to great sword style, so I often ended up switching to my big sword between battles just to heal faster. Kinda pointless mechanic, that.
The final boss is a chore. He's not that hard mechanically; I beat him in about 6 tries. But he's got a lot of health. It took like a good 20 minutes. There is a very easy way to beat this dude, though (I might have hinted at it above, ahem), but I won't spoil that for you.
Not gonna lie, the Dragon Age inspiration is pretty evident. But it stops short of outright plagiarism.
The verdict: I believe I saw this on some "hidden RPG gems" YouTube video, and realized it was already just sitting there in my library because of some bundle, I guess. So I gave it a shot, and was pleasantly surprised. It's short and sweet - 17 hours and I completed almost all the side quests. If it ever comes on sale, don't hesitate to pick it up.

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.

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.

This game was difficult in the first actual gameplay level after tutorial! :S ended up getting a trainer to skill up and play through, mainly because I wanted to check it out for the art style, but then I found the progression system for gear and the combat to actually play pretty well. Some iffyness with the camera on occasion, and it might feel a little dated compared to other third person action rpgs, definitely reminds you of the xbox era, but this was actually pretty good.

Big issue with the controller recognition though, had to search the discussion boards for a fix and it requires downloading a github repo. But yeah I like a lot of elements of this from a design perspective. Pick it up for a dollar!

It is a very mediocre game that has an extremely tedious and long introduction chapter. Yet by the middle, you are starting to get into it. Especially when you maxed one of your skills, it is always hard with Spiders because despite its own charm the gameplay and dialogues are pretty bland. However, if you have nothing to do, try it out.