Bellwright Review

Survival games are everywhere these days, so it takes a lot to stand out. Bellwright aims to do this in an admittedly unique way: by mixing some Mount & Blade into the game. The result is a survival game with some awkward combat that you can eventually avoid by raising armies to do it all for you instead. It sounds great, but a lot of the usual survival game issues still get in the way.

You begin the game returning to your homeland after being attacked by assassins, determined to reclaim it from the tyrannical rulers that framed you for the murder of the Prince years ago. The game begins slowly, even for a survival game, but it takes all of five minutes to encounter my biggest issue with the game: the inventory. You have a certain number of slots in your inventory, but items don’t stack at all, so the material gathering, especially early on, is absolutely dreadful as your bag fills up so quickly and you can’t craft a larger bag until hours into the game.

It takes a while for you to get a pickaxe as well, so you have to scour the ground for stone and ores instead of more quickly mining it, and to research farming, so you’re gathering wild flax instead of growing and harvesting it much closer to home. You need so, so much flax as it’s used in virtually all the early constructions and many types of equipment, so this becomes a real chore.

However, as miserable as this sounds, it does get better. Early on you’ll get a quest to set up a village of your very own where you’ll be able to recruit NPCs to do some gathering for you. They’re a bit slow, always strolling as leisurely as possible, but at least they’re doing it. Then you’ll eventually unlock things like the foraging hut so you’ll be able to instruct them to gather lots of flax. Then the farm lets you grow it yourself! Progress!

NPCs can do more than just foraging, in fact they can do basically anything you need, including crafting items and constructing buildings, and the more they do it the better they’ll get as they level up the specific skills. Again, this helps to cut down on the laborious nature of doing things for yourself. Constructing a building involves literally placing every single stick and bit of flax onto the construction with the press of a button, one at a time. This might seem pleasing from this side of the experience, where you haven’t done it yet, but from the other side it’s an incredibly frustrating waste of time. I’d rather just hold a button and watch a progress bar fill up than walk around or spin on the spot pressing R2 over and over. Your villagers don’t seem to mind though, so they can do it instead.

Speaking of things you want the NPCs to do for you, let’s move onto combat. It’s messy to say the least. Think of Mount & Blade or Chivalry’s directional attacks and defence – you flick the right analog stick to the right before pressing the attack button and you’ll attack to the right with your weapon, and the same for blocking. The issue is that, especially early on when you’re using weaker weapons, bumping into an enemy with a shield means you’re in for a lengthy, protracted fight as all your attacks are easily blocked with a shield. Thankfully you can just get as many villagers as possible, gear them up with a couple of hours of grinding and crafting, make them your companions, then order them all to attack while you stand back, taking shots with a bow and arrow. Once you’ve researched it.

As you’ve no doubt pick up on, this game suffers from another issue many other survival games do. They start far too early in their tech tree. It is patently absurd that I don’t know how to make a spear at the beginning of this game – it’s just a big pointy stick, maybe with something strapped to the end of it – and you can’t plant a single seed until you’ve researched how to farm. Despite your character supposedly being a full-grown adult, they start the game without about as much world knowledge as a 2-year-old.

As you do flesh out your learnings, there are various bottlenecks you find in the construction and crafting, which leans heavily on key resources that you have to gather excessively before you can grow or craft them. Flax, hemp, and river reeds and the worst offenders, but straps, which you might discover only drop from enemies after you cleared out all nearby enemies, deserve an honourable mention.

If you can get past all of that, there is a decent survival game in here. Once you’ve got some farms going and a good amount of villagers to do all the work, it’s satisfying to see them progress, to head out and complete quests for the nearby village, and so on. It just feels like it’s getting in its own way early on, forcing a start that is so slow that I wanted to give up.

There are a few accessibility options that allow you to fine tune the difficulty, but they don’t make too much difference. The options for reducing or increasing damage applies to both you and enemies, so it’s effectively useless for the purposes of lowering the difficulty. The main issue is missing options for reducing material costs or increasing gathering gains, because that’s the real issue with the game.

There are also a lot of UI and control issues. Using a trigger to gather items feels strange compared to tapping a face button, but one that you can learn to live with. However, the inconsistency of the UI, where with some crafting stations you open crafting interface or the menu where you leave orders for your villagers by going to different bits of the station, whilst on another you access the orders menu by scrolling down in a little dropdown menu before pressing the interact button. The inventory is awkward as well, though that’s far from unique in the genre. It’s just a bit chaotic and fiddly, just enough so that you will still occasionally mess things up when you’re hours into the game.