The new game from the Polish development studio Donkey Crew is following in big footsteps. The Mix of genres from Bellwright is reminiscent of successful titles like Medieval Dynasty or Mount & Blade. We've had the game for 40 hours Early access tested and tell you what there is to do in the medieval world.
A traumatic past
Our protagonist has to flee his own homeland at the age of ten. By an unfortunate coincidence he is accused of murdering the king's daughter. He then flees to another country with a friend of his father. As fate would have it, the friend is murdered there by an assassin.
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Ten years after the original escape, the protagonist sets off again to his home country to find out more about the murderer and his past. And then we come into play. But before we get to that Survival -Building Mix, we first need to create our character.
The selection is very rudimentary. We can change the head, hair and name of our protagonist. Here we also decide on a male or female appearance when “selecting the head”. There are three hairstyles and beards to choose from for the male character, while women can only choose from two hairstyles.
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Source: Snail Games USA
Let's go to the Netherlands
After the clear character creation, we start the game. The backstory is set to music in English and told with still images. Once we arrive in the protagonist's former country of origin, we start, as is typical of survival, without any equipment or weapons. On the way to the first village we fill our rather small inventory with the items along the way.
When we arrive in the first village, the residents initially don't want to have anything to do with us. You don't trust a stranger here, they say, and send us to the village elder.
We earn his trust and that of the village over the course of the game through the residents' quests. This is an essential part of Bellwright, because immediately after the first conversation with the village elder, we build our first hut. In doing so, we are laying the foundation for our first village.
We are building our town in the medieval Lowlands. In German, the country is called, thanks to the often funny translation: Netherlands. In typical survival style, we roam across large meadows, surrounded by dense forests and mountains, through an open game world with no loading times. In addition to the nature of the game, we can also discover different villages.
The pretty graphics create a lot of atmosphere with the dynamic day-night rhythm and the weather. Sometimes, despite all the dynamics, there are still small graphic bugs. Suddenly it becomes daylight in the middle of the night. In our test, such problems always disappeared quite quickly.
Source: Snail Games USA
The building begins
The structure of ours own settlement is the main part of the game. At the beginning we travel a lot and collect resources to build new buildings. We select an unlocked structure from our construction menu and place the blueprint on the ground. Buildings in particular require some resources in the game. With the small inventory, we have to walk back and forth between the forest and the construction site a few times.
Once we have all the raw materials together, many white balls appear in the air above the construction site. A construction step can now be carried out on each of these indicators with a left click. So we watch step by step how our buildings are created – small huts, fireplaces and a workbench. After dozens of mouse clicks on small white dots, it's okay. It's time for someone to take on this task for us. In the various villages the residents have some tasks for us. With each level of trust we can persuade more villagers to join us.