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The authentic Italian medieval adventure 1348 Ex Voto puts us as into the boots of a knight errant and tasks us with a dangerous rescue mission.
When we first had the opportunity to view a demo of 1348 Ex Voto last fall, I was very curious but also positively impressed: it’s not that often that we see tales inspired by an Italian setting and the premise of a game to focus mostly on story and action was enough to intrigue me. It’s certainly a fascinating project, even though it was clear from the start that this was made by a small team and that we couldn’t inevitably expect something too big out of it, but I imagine the promise of a linear knightly adventure would still be enough to draw your attention, as it did for me. The story revolves around the young knight Aeta, who embarks on a journey to save Bianca, the person who she loves the most.
After trying out the game for myself for about 4 hours, I must say that I was pleasantly impressed by the graphics. Even after having to lower the settings a bit to play at a decent frame rate in 1440p with a GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU, I was still able to appreciate the lovely scenery the game is set in. The character models are not quite as refined — especially the mouth movements which can look quite a bit weird in my opinion — but it’s probably something that can easily be ignored. As for the story itself, there’s nothing truly ground-breaking and it seems to just the story in time, although I do think it’s nice that they do reference the pestilence happening to justify certain events happening, like abandoned cities and other folks turning into outlaws just to survive these new circumstances.
Something that proves the developers wanted to make the game historically believable and not just a completely fabricated work of fantasy, which I always appreciate. As for the performances itself, I have to give high praise to Jennifer English who voices Bianca. She always helped make every scene she was in memorable, even if she’s not the main character and has limited appearances.
Unfortunately, where the game suffers the most is the gameplay itself, with the combat in particular feeling shallow and not as well refined as I’d previously hoped. Aeta gets access to two fighting styles for her great sword, one-handed and two-handed specifically with players having to switch moves on the fly, depending on the enemies they face and to avoid having their blows blocked. In theory, at least, because the combat is not particularly refined and tends to be repetitive enough, to the point where you can probably just do quickly a hit and a dodge until you get rid of almost every enemy in your path.
The only exception seem to be the bosses, who seem to regrettably seem to be very unbalanced. They don’t only have a huge block guard that regenerates over time if you don’t attack, additionally they’re able to string attacks together relentlessly which doesn’t give you enough to react. It doesn’t help that your own guard feels for the most part useless and tends to do more harm than good with timing – a flaw which unfortunately becomes very prominent during these boss fights, where a good guard should actually be able to help you overcome the obstacles in your path.
1348 Ex Voto is a very linear adventure, with very limited room for exploration — and it doesn’t help that the game often glitches out if you try to go on a path the developers did not predict, therefore you can’t even level up properly. All you can do is make sure you buy the best upgrades possible to survive the longest time possible.
Since there are no difficulty or accessibility settings either, I had to momentarily stop my playthrough at one of these bosses. I tried to overcome one for a period of time close to 1 hour until I finally gave up and decided to wait for a the game’s balance to be patched in the future. I have no problem admitting that I’m not a “god gamer”, but I fear there’ll be plenty of people stuck in the same predicament as I did, so hopefully the developers will take notice and either make those fights a bit easier or add a few settings to help balance things out. 1348 Ex Voto is now available for PC via Steam, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
Final Thoughts
Overall this is a game that should be played mostly as an interactive story than for the gameplay itself. As I mentioned earlier it’s not exactly ground-breaking, but the environment and the settings themselves are still done well enough that anyone can appreciate them. That is why so far I have mixed feelings about 1348 Ex Voto since I would really like to love the game but I genuinely believe that a few more months in development could have only helped the overall quality of the game and its combat sections.
The game’s publisher Dear Villagers provided us with a PC copy of 1348 Ex Voto.