Unusual ‘Operencia’ requires mix of skills

An homage to the classic first-person dungeon crawlers such as “Wizardry” and “Grimrock,” “Operencia: The Stolen Sun” melds old-school combat with modern twists in a satisfying jaunt through a fairytale land soaked in Central European mythos.

“Operencia” is created by a Hungarian team, and along with standard fantasy elements (skeletons, castles, spooky forests), heavily features fairytales and legends from that region.

The title, “Stolen Sun,” refers to the Sun King Napkiraly, whose kidnapping — which comes with the threat of eternal darkness — starts the game’s events in motion. The focus on Hungarian folklore gives the game a unique feel.

Combat is performed by your chosen team of four, a player-created custom character and three companions (out of six available characters). The player’s character will be either a warrior, mage or hunter. Three skill trees (left, right and middle) offer a wide range of customization, such as creating a character optimized for damage, defense or utility.

There are many viable teams, but the general rule of thumb is to have a mix of skills for any type of battle, such as area-of-effect attacks, elemental and physical damage and moves that can hit enemies at different distances, as well as control and status effects.

Each character has up to nine active skills, and the hard part will be choosing which skills to take into battle.

In combat mode, every battle has three “lanes” where enemies appear — front, middle and back. Some skills work better at different ranges. Unlike the enemies (and unlike most earlier dungeoncrawlers) your characters are not in any kind of front/back positioning, so any of them can be hit by any attack. War- rior-types can get the ability to taunt the enemy, thus drawing attacks and protecting the squishier mages.

Using skills requires energy, which along with health is not recovered between fights. Instead, a skill that has a cooldown restores energy to the team, meaning combat is not necessarily about oneshot-ing every encounter with your most powerful attacks, but managing your resources efficiently so that the party has something left in the tank for the next fight.

“Operencia” is packed with a lot of the more modern roleplaying-game sensibilities, such as items that improve, aka “buff” (or de-buff) hit chance, critical hit chance, and so on. Lots of items (including special item sets that give bonuses for equipping more pieces) are available, and not just for the main character. The companions can be customized through equipment and skill tree choices throughout the game. There’s even a crafting system to create new armor and weapons.

Combat is just one piece of

the puzzle — pun intended, as puzzles are the other major component of the game. They range from dead simple (pick up the key and open the door next to it) to head-scratchers that will leave you wondering about your own intelligence. There are all kinds of hidden secrets and clues in the game.

Saves are limited, requiring firewood to make camp, which is also where the majority of the story is told, in the style of friends around a campfire. The stories use hand-drawn parallax art that slides across the screen like the pages of a pop-up picture book.

Much of the voice-acting and banter between characters is superb, and the original orchestral soundtrack is excellent.

“Operencia” is created by Zen Studios, an indie Hungarian developer best known for its various licensed Pinball FX titles in partnership with properties such as Star Wars, Fallout, Portal, Marvel and The Walking Dead.

“Operencia’s” recent expansion to more platforms also came with some updates, such as an extra-hard difficulty mode, the rebalancing of many skills and items, the option to re-spec skill points, and bug fixes. The newest difficulty setting, called Betyar (a term for 19th-century romanticized Hungarian outlaws), increases enemy damage, health and aggressiveness by 20% and reduces their skill cooldown times.

Some of the other difficulty options are turning off the mapping system and adding the option of permanent death for characters.

“Operencia” is a linear game, so playing through it once is likely enough, but there are achievements for adding difficulties and beating it a second time, along with the option to try the many different ways to customize characters.

Overall, expect to spend 20 to 25 enjoyable hours to beat the game.