Forsaken Realms: Vahrin's Call Review

Titan Roc delivers an old-school role-playing adventure that rewards patience, exploration, and experimentation despite a few rough edges.

Forsaken Realms: Vahrin’s Call is the type of RPG that feels made for players who long for old fantasy adventures. Rather than following the current trends or trying to be the next big open-world blockbuster, it takes cues from games like Fable and builds on the idea that exploration, progression, and player freedom matter more than sheer map size. 

That decision is even more impressive when you realize Titan Roc is made up of only around seven developers. For such a small independent team, the ambition on display is impossible to ignore. Forsaken Realms: Vahrin's Call isn't a sequel but the beginning of a new fantasy world, complete with its history, political conflicts, monsters, and factions. 

You step into the boots of a custom-created mercenary instead of a predefined hero with an established personality. 

Your character is a blank slate so you can imagine your background and motivations through the course of the journey. That freedom does come with a tradeoff, though: your protagonist is seldom the center of conversations or story moments. But the focus stays fixed on the world around you, the people who inhabit it.

The land of Vahrin is full of warring kingdoms, menacing beasts, political strife, and thousands of years of history. Forsaken Realms: Vahrin's Call doesn’t just force-feed you all the lore in long cutscenes; instead, it expects you to piece it together through conversations, letters, notes, environmental clues, and the people you meet.

That style isn't always straightforward to follow during the opening hours. You'll hear names of cities, factions, and historical events before fully understanding their importance, making it feel like you've stepped into an ongoing conversation. 

If you're willing to slow down and absorb everything, the story gradually becomes much easier to appreciate. One thing that would have helped considerably is an in-game codex. With so many characters, locations, and political groups to remember, having a built-in encyclopedia would have made following the narrative much more convenient.

Instead of offering one enormous seamless open world, Forsaken Realms uses a hub-based structure similar to classic RPGs. Every major region acts as a large semi-open area that you can freely explore and revisit throughout the adventure. 

As you progress, fast travel makes moving between hubs much quicker, allowing you to return for newly unlocked quests, collectibles, or optional bosses. This gives every region lasting value, since returning later often reveals fresh side quests, new rewards, and additional reasons to explore places you've already visited.

Exploration quickly becomes one of the game's most significant strengths. 

There are useful rewards to be found in almost every area, whether they are better weapons, armor, crafting ingredients, herbs, treasure chests hidden in secret locations, skill books, or powerful enemies with valuable loot. Villages, forests, caves, ruins, and wilderness areas all feel hand-built rather than procedurally generated, giving each location its identity.

That said, movement can sometimes work against the feeling of freedom. You will often come across rocks that look like you can climb on or fences that look like they are easy to jump over, but then you will discover yourself in front of an invisible wall. The world often feels more open than it is, reminding you that you are meant to follow certain paths. 

One of the more interesting mechanics is with shrines scattered throughout each region. Once you turn on those glow-in-the-dark checkpoints, they become your new respawn point when you die. The catch is that activating them will also respawn nearby slain enemies. 

This provides a constant stream of enemies to fight for combat, experience and skill improvement. On the other hand, this means you'll often have to fight through areas you've already cleared, which can become frustrating during certain quests.

Quest design encourages you to spend time outside the main campaign. The primary story generally follows familiar RPG structure, but the side content is where the world really comes alive. Bounty hunts, monster contracts, optional bosses, hidden areas, and smaller stories reward you with better equipment, gold, spells, and crafting materials. 

You can also customize how quest navigation works. Traditional objective markers are available if you prefer direct guidance, but you can also disable them and rely entirely on NPC directions, creating a much stronger sense of discovery similar to older RPGs.

Combat gives you plenty of freedom when deciding how you want to fight.

There are no locked classes, so you can switch from sword and shield to dual wielding, heavy weapons, bow, or multiple schools of magic at any time. Various enemies force you to change your equipment, as some are resistant to slashing damage while others are extremely vulnerable to blunt weapons or elemental attacks.

Battles are more about managing stamina than mindlessly mashing buttons. Normal attacks do not cost stamina, but blocking, dodging, parrying, sprinting, heavy attacks, and special abilities do. It really makes you think hard about when to defend and when to go on the attack. 

Dodge rolls also grant you some temporary invincibility frames, similar to Souls-inspired combat, rewarding you for skillful play with successful parries and well-timed rolls. This system works well for boss fights where you learn attack patterns, but you also need to prepare the right equipment and consumables beforehand.

The combat mechanics are good overall, but they don’t always feel as satisfying as they could be. The swings of the weapons feel light sometimes, certain attacks feel sluggish, and enemies don't seem to react all that much when hit. Audio feedback is also inconsistent, with some hits sounding powerful while others are hardly audible. 

Character progression is where Forsaken Realms: Vahrin's Call really shines. Instead of selecting a permanent class, you improve by actually using your preferred weapons and abilities. Swing swords often, and your sword skills increase.

Spend more time casting spells, and your magical abilities continue to grow. Every combat style has its skill tree filled with passive bonuses and active abilities, and you can freely refund skill points whenever you want. That flexibility lets you experiment without worrying about ruining your build.

Magic is learned naturally during the course of the adventure, allowing you to use elemental attacks as well as support spells to augment your melee combat. 

Alchemy is just as vital. Collect herbs, mushrooms, fruit skins, and more from around the world to brew custom potions with multiple effects. Increasing your alchemy level unlocks stronger recipes and additional ingredient slots. After a successful brewing, the potion will take time to replenish its charges, so you won’t need to constantly gather ingredients to keep your potions stocked.

Better still, crafted potions regenerate their charges over time instead of disappearing forever, making experimentation much more rewarding. You can also create traps and other useful tools that become especially valuable during tougher encounters.

Visually, Forsaken Realms: Vahrin's Call delivers a convincing medieval fantasy world using Unreal Engine 4. The environments are easily the strongest part of its presentation. The forests, villages, caves, ruins, and open landscapes all feel well thought out, helping foster the illusion that you are exploring a living world. 

Character models don't reach the same level of quality. NPC faces can appear fairly generic, and several models are reused often enough that different characters sometimes look almost identical. Character creation gives you enough options to build your own hero, but it isn't nearly as detailed as what you'd expect from a major AAA RPG. 

All of the voice acting is surprisingly good, with the vast majority of performances sounding natural and keeping conversations interesting. Another plus is the soundtrack, which includes orchestral music that fits the game’s fantasy setting perfectly. The music is always in line with the atmosphere, whether you are just exploring peaceful villages or fighting dangerous creatures, and it is never distracting.

The user interface is the weakest part of the presentation. Inventory management is very text-heavy, and it’s hard to quickly tell what’s new gear in long lists of equipment and crafting materials. Loot is constantly flowing in, so you'll spend quite a bit of time sorting through menus. 

Performance is consistent overall but could use optimization work. 

Even if you have the recommended requirements, you can still get the occasional frame drop and stutter, especially if you don’t have the modern upscaling features active. Overall stability is not too much of an issue. Serious bugs, crashes, etc. are rare. The biggest technical issue is inconsistent performance.

Forsaken Realms: Vahrin's Call succeeds because it understands exactly what kind of RPG it wants to be. It’s not trying to compete with the big AAA open-world games. Instead, it’s about rewarding exploration, flexible character building, meaningful progression, and a handcrafted fantasy world that encourages you to slow down and take it all in. 

The hub-based structure works well; side quests often outshine the main campaign, and the freedom to reshape your build at any point makes experimentation a true joy. Add in rewarding exploration and meaningful progression, and you have reasons to stray away from the main path instead of running to the next story objective.

It’s not without its issues. Combat is more satisfying, but movement restrictions can hinder exploration, inventory management is cumbersome, and the story would benefit from a better codex. The performance also has scope for improvement. But that doesn't take away from what Titan Roc has done. 

For a self-funded RPG from such a small team, Forsaken Realms: Vahrin's Call is a surprisingly rich fantasy adventure that captures much of the charm of classic role-playing games while modernizing enough of the formula to feel fresh.