Bound by Flame

It is essentially The Witcher bought from a dollar store, but with the difficulty cranked up to "Sadistic."
You play as a mercenary possessed by a demon, but the true evil force in this game is the combat system. You aren't just fighting monsters; you are fighting the controls, the camera, and the fact that a random skeleton does more damage than a nuclear bomb. You will spend 90% of the fight rolling around on the floor and the other 10% drinking health potions because the parry window is microscopic.
A "Euro-jank" RPG where the difficulty setting ranges from "Unfair" to "Why am I doing this to myself?"

I enjoyed playing this game on PS4 in 2014 but couldn't beat the last boss; it was very frustrating. I decided to play it again on Steam and enjoyed every moment. The game still delivers even after so many years.
The story is about a war between mages and elves against necromancers who filled the world with the undead. You play as a mercenary named Vulcan who specializes in creating deadly traps; he and his team, the Freeborn Blades, were assigned to protect some mages while they are performing a ritual. Alas, the ritual went wrong, and a demon possessed you and began speaking in your head, urging you to take its path to end this war. It is up to you to listen to it or dismiss it.
You can choose to be either a male or female character with limited customization of your character. The fighting style, however, can be changed between a warrior and a ranger, and then fire magic after the demon possesses you. I found the fighting fun, as you can switch between weapons during battle and even craft arrows if you run out, provided you have the components.
As you level up, you can unlock more skills in the skill tree for each fighting style; you can also get buffs for your attacks or items, and even the skill of haggling, which is quite helpful to purchase better equipment with less gold. Those points you get as you level up. I liked the armor and weapons upgrades; you can add boosts, and you can actually see your armor looks different than how it originally was.
I can't consider the game open-world, as the maps are very small and have a specific path to follow, and once you finish a chapter, you can't revisit the previous area.
I loved the soundtracks, especially the last area; they did a great job with it. The characters' style is lacking; they all look the same to me the more I look at them, and the elves look more like humans than typical elves do, with their facial hair. But it is not bad, considering this game is very old. The voice acting is excellent; the conversations don't sound medieval, but the sarcastic main character made it funny. It reminds me so much of Dragon Age 2. The graphics aren't bad at all, and the gameplay is fun. The tutorials could overwhelm you at first, but you'll get used to all the game mechanics. I played with a controller and had no problem with the fighting.
The romance in this game is gender locked; you can't romance the same gender, and there is no actual scene. To romance your companions, you must finish their personal quest in each act. There are three acts, with nine chapters in total besides the prologue chapter. To romance everyone, you need to replay the game 4 times.
There are three endings in total, and based on how you respond to the demon, you'll either be fully demon, half a demon, or preserve your humanity and never listen to it. The last boss was still as difficult as I remember, but you could always change the difficulty of the game mid-game.
Pros:
+Dark story of possession and demons.
+Good artwork.
+Choices have real consequences.
+Switching classes and crafting mid-battle.
+Companions and romance (Romance is gender locked)
+Fitting soundtracks.
+Good voice-overs (Game is fully voiced)
+Medieval fantasy.
+Multiple endings.
+Manual save (total of 50, and there are autosaves)
+Steam achievements.
Cons:
-You can't skip cutscenes.
-Some backtracking is required. (No fast traveling)
-Limited character customization.
-No variety of NPCs' faces.
I've encountered a couple of crashes during cutscenes, but nothing major, as the game keeps on autosaving all the time, and you get 50 manual saves, along with a quick save. The game is enjoyable if you like classic games and don't mind the dated graphics. The story and the main character's sarcastic remarks are worth it.
𝐹𝑜𝑟 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑟𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑤𝑠 𝑐𝘩𝑒𝑐𝑘 𝑚𝑦 𝑐𝑢𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑜𝑟 𝑝𝑎𝑔𝑒 𝐹𝑒𝑒𝑛𝑎'𝑠 𝐶𝘩𝑜𝑖𝑐𝑒
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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

Bound by Flame is a mid-budget grimdark RPG that has some charm to it even though it clearly lacks polish. The combat is probably the highlight, especially since you have different weapons (a two-handed sword that has slower attacks, a pair of daggers that attack faster, and fire magic that allows for ranged combat or infusing your weapons with flame attacks), and the game focuses on timing blocks/dodges/parries, making the combat more action-oriented. The demon possession mechanic is also a cool idea, even if the story doesn’t fully take advantage of it.
At the same time, the game definitely feels rough around the edges. The writing is pretty generic and forgettable and trying very hard to be edgy; enemy encounters start repeating themselves; your companions are pretty useless and don't help much; the camera/target lock can become frustrating during fights with a larger number of enemies; quests mostly feel like busywork; voice acting is pretty mediocre but amusing at times (Private Bumpkin is a standout character) and the low-budget presentation becomes noticeable fairly quickly. Still, for its current price (or getting it for under 1 EUR when it's discounted), I'd say it's worth your time if you enjoy some mindless Euro-jank.

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)

It has a certain charm to it. Sure it's clanky at times like any budget title, but I'm enjoying the game. It's one of those games that feels a little late to the party, meaning if it had released 6-8 years earlier it would've been praised.
It's .76 cents on sale and more than worth it.

For anyone playing this in 2026

This game is over a decade old now, and if you're comparing it to the yearly heavyweights, you might be disappointed.

Let me be clear: this game is good, despite the mixed reviews. I enjoyed it so much that I jumped straight into a second playthrough on max difficulty—well, mostly to make different choices, but it's definitely worth a second run. And this is coming from someone who grinds Apex all day.

Bound by Flame has a very familiar fantasy setting, right out of most anime or movies in the genre, which is exactly why I gravitated towards it. Plus, I wanted something that didn't demand 100% of my attention. Played this on controller, and of course, I had to hunt down a fix before playing—but I found one. Here:

It took a while to nail the parry and dodge timings, but we got there. The monsters can be punishing at first, but that's only until the controls click—my second run felt EZ!.

The characters, the world, and its lore aren't bad; some have genuinely cool backstories that'll make you like them. The camp areas make sense given the story, though the maps themselves were a bit disappointing. The music? 10/10. Aside from that, there isn't much else to say—it's a straightforward action RPG. It's always on sale, and at that price, it's absolutely worth your time and money.

Fun fact: the MC's VA also voices Ballistic in Apex (yes, I main him).

The game runs at 60fps and could probably run on a potato. There's a surprising amount of detail on armor, clothes, and weapons, and it's well-optimized—unlike some Unreal Engine garbage out there. It might crash on the Blackfrost Castle map (just lower the settings all the way down). For a game that's only 5GB, I squeezed over 20 hours of gameplay on my second run.