Vagrus - The Riven Realms

if you're serious the game will match that

Do not buy play Demo first before buying.

The setting is quite unique and fresh!
The gameplay can be quite hard unti you get the hang of it.
All in all a nice ordeal.

I want to like this game. It's something akin to star traders frontiers, but on a planet, with good exploration options. But...but...

So, you start in the middle of a vast continent, marked with roads and cities, all enticing you to explore them. To build up your resources and make the long journey. But, your first indication is that you can't go south, this way is blocked due to event. OK....maybe that will open up. And then you make it to the center of the map, and venture east. But then you hit an event wall there. OK...OK. Then you venture north, there's this enticing city on the northern coast, a good ways away. And, as you get towards there, once again, and event pops up. "Sandstorms." You need to turn back.

So, then you look online, and you understand that NONE of these areas will open up, or are actually available. Despite a vast map, you're basically locked into 10% of it. You'd already basically explored the entire map.

That I believe killed my excitement.

Really love this game!

Scratches the itch for being transported to another world and going on an adventure of exploration into the unknown. Wander the wasteland Vagrus. Highly recommended. If you like games like Caravaneer 2 you will love this.

I played early access and then full version.

And this game really does not feel like a flushed out experience and developer is releasing dlcs while the main game feels like bare bones.

Loved the caravan concept but it in my opinion falls flat, usually its not about trade but finding an easy exploit route where you can make big cash and then do what you please.

Starting towns got a lot of text and lore but some magnificent and interesting things you find on the outskirts are bare bones, very little interaction with the world really.

Quest are very generic but what is expected of a caravan.

Combat is unforgiving but there are definitely ways to improve it.

Overall cash grab of something that would been something really unique and enjoyable 4/10

And maybe it would improve but most likely all the improvaments will be behind a paywall.

Fun, story-driven rpg. It's not what I would call high octane (go find yourself and action rpg if that's what you're after) and it takes a bit of getting used to but IMO it's definitely worth the effort.

Fantasy Roman over the road trucker simulator

The Riven Realms is an underrated indie masterpiece that blends rich storytelling, and brutal survival mechanics. The writing is top-notch, with choices that genuinely impact the stories. Its resource management require careful planning, rewarding those who embrace its complexity.

Incredibly fun and detailed game set in a harsh world! A bit to taste, but god I'm so excited for more of this. I can foresee myself playing this for a LONG time

its just kinda boring, do trade routes, and fight in really basic battles. Like if you enjoy running back and forth between like 3 towns over and over for hours at a time you will like this game, but I can't think of anyone that applies to. Lore is kinda interesting but the gameplay is just not strong enough to warrant going out and finding said lore. and its often very tedious, like explore one tile of a ruin and get a permanent debuff to your caravan that can only be removed at a handful of locations, its super obnoxious.

I'm playing free play and the hard mode/intended version of the game. This is my first playthrough of this game.
It was kinda hard at first. And i cut it pretty close, and had to limp to a city a couple times and turn a few tight corners.
But now i got 4 beasts of burden, decent gear, and enough armed men and mounted men to wreck house with any encounter i find...

It's a great game with an amazing and inspired world with a clear vision.

That being said, there is a lot of reading.

As long as you read, the game just drops victory in your lap, it literally explains how to win. So, seems hard, can be in the beginning due to unknown systems. But is like learning to ride a bike. When you know it, you get it.

I dunno for now, but it seems replayability may be rather low. I do read everything that pops up, but imagining having to read it again feels rather mind numbing, so. Consider that a factor, this is probably a one time play game. But makes up for it with literal hundreds of hours of stuff to do and explore and people to meet.

8/10, trading numbers give happy chemicals.

if you are any fan of fantasy (especially the detailed and 'Realistic' kind) than you have to give this game a try, i loved it the moment i saw the store page and cant recommend this game enough.

One of my favorite games of all time!

It's a game that really rewards you for engaging with the story and has a ton of lore and world building for those that enjoy a deep, rich history to be discovered. It's clear the writers put a lot of time and care into the game. The unique setting is perfect for those who like brutality in their fantasy. I've already put so many hours into this game and I keep finding new and interesting things that keep me engaged and keep the game fresh.

There is a learning curve and lots of reading, but it's essentially a text based adventure game so don't expect lots of flashy visuals.

Love the rich world and the unforgiving gameplay meshes perfectly with the world your caravan is exploring. The gameplay is very different, but it reminds me of the sunless games. Very well written.

Excellent deep and thoughtful game.

Great game, reminds me of sunless sea but even better and more varied with its quests, companions and types of combat.

Amazing game, amazing story telling. The ambience is immersive and the music just go so well with the setting.
Do not buy this game if you do not like reading or hard games. This game is punishing and has pages and pages of texts.
If you like slower pace games where you get immersed in a strange and harsh world and you just take your time to read and decide the next steps for your caravan, this might be a gem for you.

To companions are great. There's a good amount of customisation through character and companion progression and caravan management.

Must buy +++

Wonderful game with a unique setting, if you are ok with a lot of reading and are interested in a carvan management game ( there is much more to it than that) this is right up your alley!

I love this game. The writing is good and the art really fits my taste. I especially like the world-setting and I also like how you are expanding the playable map one by one. The only thing I hope can be different is that this game can be turned into a traditional story driven cRPG instead of a open world merchant simulation game. What I meant is that I want to see some true endings for many of the stories in this game. It's just that a lot of quests including the companions' ones are left in a cliffhanger. Hopefully you guys are going to make another game in the future with the same world setting.

The game is exactly what it looks like,
if you were intrigued by the trailer and by what it says on the store page, you should get it.
If you played Battle brothers, Sunless sea or Sunless Skies, and enjoyed the aspects of caravan/crew management, having to travel across a map and manage dwindling supplies and morale from one job to the other, evaluating risk reward constantly, then you will enjoy this game too!
I will say though, I spent a few hours going through the prologue/tutorial, It felt okay, but I knew I wanted to invest some time learning the game.
After the tutorial finished, it tells you and even tells you go start a proper sandbox game. That's exactly what I did and Now I'm HOOKED. The quality of writing and gameplay now that I'm in the main game feels much better.
I feel like I've got a firm grasp of how the game works now after the tutorial, so I can take in information and make hard choices.
I feel like the quality of writing and world building is drawing me in.
This is the closest we get to Dark Sun in 2025

Fantastic game with one of the most beautifully well made and well realized worlds I've gotten to be a part of in a long time.

It most evocatively captures that stark, alien bleakness of Morrowind and thats captured in the writer's unflinching adherence to their own world building and narrative.

Ive seen lots of complaints about the game being hard, unfair or too challenging and I strongly disagree with those claims. It is a ROLE-PLAYING game. Immerse yourself as a Vagrus, live like you would if you were a part of this world and you'll find it its challenges to be beautifully immersive.

Good game

good

Try Demo before buying. It is a good game but with very iffy taste.

Things I don't like:

Game incentifies hustling while providing you with WALLLLS of text. You either tune your brain to hustle (and completely ignore walls of text unless there is a price tag somewhere along the lines) or tune into RPG element (and then your progress basically turns to a halt, because you read and read and read and then you execute an action).

Lots of text becomes obsole second time around, but there's no visual cue to read lines, I forget about it, click it and wham - nothing - I just robbed myself of time.

Companion combat is... I don't know, I usually don't do it, it feels like lacking depth.

Caravan combat actions are laughable most of the time: Well I can make your median outcome worse, but I can very slightly increase your chance for crit success if you click me! Gee, thanks, I'll stick to makeshift barricade, that actually seems to shift numbers in a meaningful way.

It's that kind of slog that stops being funny for an adhd brain, because rewards are hardly noticable. After a bit of learning the ropes and hustling I could afford a bigger caravan, awesome! More space, more packages to trade! I dipped my neurons in dopamine sauce and crunched like crazy. Then I have learned I can buy an outpost only if I could deposit few hundreds bross. Awesome! New kick. Then I have learned that to buy an outpost I have to grind that incremental game of hustle which would be a fine goal but 'sides hustling there's only fighting and both start to feel repetitive after a while. No problem, you say? Do some quests? Yea, a lot of them are fetch quests, with mulitple stages even.
Problem is, to get the goods and haul my a*s back to Lumen or whatever sh*thole my questgiver is in, I have to always map a meaningful route with supplies, trade and factions quests along the way to earn back for those supplies and then some. That is fun to do like fifty times in a row, yea, after that it's just another chore and rewards are meager compared to a good single faction fetch.

Some visuals are... well I hate Harvak, ok? I hate his little mantis appendige, it freaks me out.

Incentive to travel is actually stiffled out: I wanted to travel further and see some actual woods right there on the map. No no, vagrus, you pitiful f*ck, you stay right here, there's some ISSUE and we cannot let anyone out all around the border. Wanna travel? Go to Avernum - Uh oh... what?! Avernum is the same sh*thole as Deven or any other sh*thole I wanna see some fu*king dragon people you twisted f*ck of an imperial guard!
Perhaps you can get there in DLC or later in the game, but oh well, that's a little too late.

Things I like:

Very, very cool and unique settings.

Hustle is real, feels good (at least for a time).

Game IS unforgiving. This no f*cks given attitude is rare and refreshing.

I can scribble my own notes uWu.

I can f*ck up Harvak and I will.

I have played a few other trading games, but this one is the best so far. It's not easy and one must pay attention. However, I cannot see a final objective that I'm working towards, besides accumulating a lot of wealth. For me, it becomes a large sandbox game, literaly, to explore. Yet after 15 hours, I am starting to lose interest trudging between cities buying and selling hopefully low then high. 65/100

Cool oldschool adventure/RPG game - it does not hold your hand, you very much have to find your own way around and figure out what to do and how to it - oh, and you WILL die on your first try.
But very nice!

Amazing mix of visual novel and roleplaying with an open world feel, Vagrus is pretty unique and while punishing, is a lot of fun.

A very different game, one that should be enjoyed at a slower pace. Great storytelling, atmosphere, and gameplay loop. The combat has grown on me; on my first playthrough (maybe a year or so ago), I disliked the combat, but this time around I've actually really enjoyed it. Only a few scenarios have left me frustrated; not really the fault of the combat mechanics but more that they're almost impossible without knowing a specific gimmick prior to the combat; blackdemon at the end of a certain companion's questline as an example.

As a testament of my enjoyment I purchased the season pass and I don't own any other season pass (or season pass like). I see myself coming back to this game many times in the future as I've still got lots to discover. I look forward to all the future content they're able to make.

This game is surprisingly fun and interesting if you like well-written text heavy adventures (I do!), and it's nice to support a small indie developer. With quite a few hours in, I've barely scratched the surface of the interesting and well-written story. Trading gameplay is great as well, although I find combat a bit hard to figure out!

In Vagrus - The Riven Realms you play as the Vagrus of a comitatus which literary translate to „Leader of a Caravan“ in game. 

The Riven Realms are a harsh place to live in, and as you play you can dig into the lore of the world the developer came up with.
There is no overarching story in the game that takes you from the start of the game to the end of it, instead you experience more or less self-contained stories along the way to your chosen victory condition. They all contribute, some more as others, to the world building and will deepen your understanding of the in game world, though.

This means you have to read a lot! At least during your first time in the riven realms.

For me, the game is a mix between a caravan trading sim / adventure book / tactical combat RPG.

Gameplay loop is basically you making money by doing trading through tasks or by yourself or through mercenary contracts. Then you use the earned money to finance exploring and proceed with some quests.
The difficulty in this game mostly comes from not knowing what the future holds for you.
Be it related to the sweet spot of the size of the comitatus you want to keep all the time, the amount of supplies you need to take with you when you go exploring, the skills that are worth investing in and so on.
And yes, there are circumstances where a failed skill check can lead to death.
However, the game autosave every in game day and whenever you leave a settlement, so even if you do not save manually from time to time you do not lose much playtime.

If you like story rich games, give it a go!
If you do not like to read, this game is not for you!

rng kills every game that is promising.


fixed it with some fine tuning. Game is fun and relaxing

Grindy and wordy

Overall, I would give it a 7.5/10.

If you enjoy reading, bump this up to an 8.5.

I absolutely love the world and the setting; I am keen to see more products related to this lore. This is definitely a game for those who love to read (I certainly fit that category). There is no lack of content, and the various stories mesh decently well together. Immersion is one of this game's strongest points.

Some of the mechanics are frustrating, if you want any shot at achievements, prepare to be frustrated and save scum a hundred times over. However, if you want to play just for the story and go with an easier experience, there is an easy mode (but no achievements).

My more serious gripe is with the initial pacing. Starting out is the biggest grind because you do not have the resources to travel far and carry much or fight many opponents. To get better paying jobs, you need to increase your reputation with a number of the factions. But to gain reputation, you need to perform jobs, which do not pay much at first. Meanwhile, you need to pay your crew or they will get very upset with you (imagine that). The first half of the game I was essentially running this small triangular circuit (once in awhile I could pick up a companion) and it was a slog. At some point the dam breaks and money did not become a concern...but I was close to stopping because of the monotony.

I did not get into the companion's stories until I was essentially halfway through the (now removed) time limit. My interest rekindled with vigor when I started going through more narrative content.

On that note, there is a guide on Steam that helps with some of the walkthroughs: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2888694005

This will save your time like nothing else. There are several instances where you advance a plot only to realize you are woefully unprepared but now are stuck with a bunch of ravenous passengers/used up cargo space you cannot offload until you level up your other companions and come back.

Despite the drawbacks, I am of the opinion that developers/studios that attempt to build unique games that actually work should be rewarded with praise and patronage. This game is truly a piece of art that is well worth the time, if you have it.

This game is amazingly fun! It's devs are hardworking who do what we all want our game devs to do...they make an awesome game!

I really enjoy this game. Very original text based adventure with lots to do. The only thing i don't really care for is all the clicks to get to your destination. It'd be great to plan your route and then punch it so it automates parts of the travel and makes it easier on your hands. Otherwise, i really enjoy this game and recommend it!

Over 200 hours on record.

Yes, I recommend this game providing you are looking for an old school, pen and paper style choose your own adventure style caravan simulator.

The type of caravan is a choice between the usual 3 for these types of games: Explorer, Merchant and Mercenary.

The storylines and attached characters are interesting, they'd have to be for you to go so far to visit some of the worst places humanity can imagine and fight the horrors you find there.

The stories are 99% of the time a book page that you choose your answers on. Yes, there are a lot of words in this. If you can't read well or don't want to, this game absolutely isn't for you.

Combat is difficult to learn and more so to master, party combat and caravan combat both influence each other and both are punishing but once you start to feel out the tactics available to you and sus out the enemies you're fighting you can ensure you always come out ahead.

The economy is simulated well enough but only impacted by your actions, sell to much of something you crash the price and it might take a week or month to recover. You can't affect what goods are produced by factions and try to influence the market that way. I'd like to see goods moved by NPC caravans affect the world to introduce reactive gameplay elements.

Caravan management is in depth, managing your employees and... Uhh... freedomly challanged workers is interesting and has pros and cons to your employment style. Same goes for the types of beast of burden you use, all have pros and cons. There's gear and equipment to install that will affect how you cross the wastes too. I love this aspect of the game.

There's no beating around the bush, this game is hard and you can find yourself in a tail spin, going down, before you've realised it and you're probably looking down the barrel of restarting the game or a soft restart where you make it to a town, downsize everything and get back on your feet with small contracts.

Yes, I recommend this game, I recommend playing it on the default difficulty and once you've played a few hours I recommend playing on 1 save mode where you have to live with the consequences of your choices. This is a game about telling an interesting story, a story without conflict and strife isn't as interesting.

The sheer amount of text in the tutorial legit gave me a headache after one and a half hours of playing. I spent more time reading the tutorial and the in-game wiki than actually playing the game. Btw the game is really not that complicated and I don't get why it 'behooves' so many walls of texts. Just make a small box 2 sentences max explaining the things in short, let me choose whatever i want to progress and lets get on with the game, shall we?

give me a rundown of the bogdanoffs

I love games that mix trade and economy with exploration of fascinating worlds, well-written story and rich lore. Vagrus is precisely that kind of game, and there's a lot here to love, from a roman-inspired, post-apo fantasy setting, to a ton of content in the form of quests, trading opportunities, companion stories and various factions you can align yourself with.

It is by no means a perfect game - in fact, I could probably find something to criticize in most of its areas. The trading is fun and takes into account a lot of variables, but the interface used is often unwieldy (for example, you can't check the last known prices in a settlement from the world map, you have to go to a separate menu; there's no clear indication what's produced in a town, only what is or isn't in demand). The personal combat is fun, but the menus are again not always intuitive, and while the character sprites look good, the scarce animations do not. Exploring the various possibilities and places in a city is fun and rich, but often requires a ton of clicking and remembering where certain things are. The writing is good, but rarely as captivating as in, say, Sunless Sea/Sky or A House of Many Doors (although these are more writing-focused games than Vargus, that's for sure). The characters have their personalities, but it's relatively easy to completely miss interactions with them or get stuck in some of their quests. The exploration is exciting, but extremely dangerous and I couldn't even find an indication on the map whether I have already been to a particular area of the wilderness and checked it for hidden stuff. The setting is fascinating, but it also seems quite static, trapped in a plot-enforced lockdown cutting it from the wider world and with no dynamic changes due to economy or the factions' conflicts, as far as I can tell.

And yet, all those nitpicks should not discourage you from trying out this game (or at least the free prologue). Most of them are not deal-breakers, but things I'd love the Devs to address in DLC/sequels/patches, and that will only happen if people buy, play and love the game!

Doesn't manage to create enjoyable mechanics around a wonderful idea. Shame.

Nice game

The grind is too real here, might as well be a second job. There is too much monotony. You are basically forced into being a boring caravan merchant, attempting to play the game as a mercenary or explorer is pointless as a starting role. Unless you like save scuming you will have a run of bad rolls and have to restart. Your companions are very weak early and anything you do will piss off someone to the point one will eventually leave. Leaving you with a more grind to get to the point you can go anywhere or do anything.

Elden Ring is a Hard Game because you have to take your time to learn mechanics. This is a hard game because everything just takes forever to do, you do the same thing over and over, and hope you don't get a few bad rolls. It needs a lot more balancing to be worth it. Unless you just don't have anything else productive to do, or love getting lost into the simplicity of repeating the same loop over and over again.

Not sure why Vagrus was not an option for best 'Story Rich' game in the upcoming game awards.
But this project definitely deserves that title, can't think of anything that comes close to it.
Not just in campaign story, but character building, world building, atmosphere, sense of urgency and accomplishment.

For intellectual fans of great reads and excellent world building, being able to put yourself in the story and being a part of the world, THIS IS IT. My only critique is that the party combat needs to flow allot smoother and better (speaking from pre-combat rework patch, planning to hop back in so hopefully that has made things better since)

Don't have much time IRL nowadays but absolutely love that moments I have eeking out an existence in the wasteland. In fact, I am still looking forward to all your upcoming content and season passes. Truly a masterpiece, a setting easily being able to immerse myself in the world and story. Reminds me of Dune but in medieval times and with magic.

Keep up the good work, huge fan!

This game is pretty hard. No shame in save-scumming. I just hope that more content that are shown in the map would be released soon. Would love to read all the lore and continuation of the trade beyond the Emperor's Road!

The best caravan simulator, the best RPG of recent years. 10/10

fun logistics story game in an apocaliptic world. hundreds of pages of lore. quests galore and amazing artwork. must play for strategic game players :)

Not sure why, but this really does it for me