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Dark Souls level design and tactical drunkenness meet in The Bard's Tale IV (PCGamesN) When designing new dungeon-based levels in games, there’s a single, inescapable shadow that looms over everything: Dark Souls. There’s no denying the impact game director Hidetaka Miyazaki has had on RPGs. Further evidence comes in the form of The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep, which, despite being from the other side of the roleplaying spectrum, owes some of its sensibilities to FromSoftware’s giant. The Bard’s Tale IV is a rough but compelling take on first-person puzzle-dungeons (RPS) I’ll be frank: The Bard’s Tale IV looks like what I’d expect to see if I found a DVD-ROM from 2005 with ‘Legend of Fantasy: Mages & Goblins’ scrawled on it. My every instinct, after the first few minutes with it, was to run screaming from its Bratz doll faces and onslaught of fol-de-rol. Books, covers and all that, though: underneath its soupy presentation, the first few hours of Wasteland 2/Torment: Wives Of Hans Gruber studio inXile’s latest act of Kickstarted ancient RPG necromancy are an enticing blend of roleplaying old and new, and of monster-bothering and puzzle-solving. The Bard’s Tale 4 is a boozy, sing-song world of fun (Polygon) The Bard’s Tale 4 feels like a work of love, celebrating the basic tenets of RPGdom, while providing a pleasing visual and auditory world appropriate to modern gaming. It demands a commitment to detail, and a taste for turn-based combat. But that’s what we all signed up for. I doubt those early access players will be disappointed. A few hours in, The Bard's Tale 4 is a captivating dungeon crawler (PC Gamer) Three hours into the beta of The Bard's Tale 4, I realized how late I'd stayed up puzzling my way through the labyrinth beneath a wizard's castle and thought: Damn, this is a really good dungeon. I was engrossed. For the first time, my surrounds were beautiful and fantastical: ethereal light from tall windows cutting through the haze, elaborate gilded statues lining the halls, secret passages rumbling open in innocuous stone walls. The puzzles were clever and quickly escalated from gimmes to satisfying headscratchers. While it takes a couple hours to get going, this feels like exactly the game I hoped The Bard's tale 4 would be: a proper dungeon crawler with a creative combat system that doesn't feel beholden to the past.