Blackguards Review — Dark Souls of Turn-Based RPGs

Blackguards, released on Steam on January 24, 2014
— a tactical RPG built on Germany's legendary pen-and-paper system, The Dark Eye.

Roughly 200 hand-crafted hexagonal battlefields, no random encounters, and a difficulty curve that will make you question your own intelligence. I played it on Hard. It took me 60 hours. I regret nothing.

Wait — a Point-and-Click Studio Made This?

Here's the thing I only discovered years later, and it reframes the entire game.

Blackguards was made by Daedalic Entertainment, in Hamburg. And before this, Daedalic were known for exactly one thing: narrative point-and-click adventures. The Whispered World. The Deponia series. Chains of Satinav. Memoria. Dialogue, puzzles, storytelling, hand-painted backgrounds.

They had never made a tactical game in their lives. And then they built one with two hundred hand-crafted battlefields.

That background explains everything about how this game feels. As one source put it: drawing on Daedalic's reputation in the adventure genre, every map and encounter in Blackguards is unique, and many battles are fairly open-ended puzzles.

Read that again, then think about what I'm about to describe:

pillars you smash to crush enemies under rubble, objectives that must be completed while enemies respawn endlessly, fights that look mathematically unwinnable until you notice one specific thing in the scenery.

Those aren't tactical RPG battles.

Those are adventure game puzzles wearing armour. People who spent a decade designing "how do I get past this locked door" spent two hundred maps asking "how do I get past these six guys who each hit twice as hard as me".

Once you see it, you can't unsee it — and it's exactly why Blackguards feels like nothing else in the genre.

The Dark Eye: Germany's Dungeons & Dragons

A word on the source material, because it deserves it.

The Dark Eye — Das Schwarze Auge in German — isn't just a German tabletop RPG. It's the German tabletop RPG. Created in 1984, it's consistently described as the leading pen-and-paper role-playing system in Germany. It's their D&D.

GamesRadar put it perfectly in their review: "You've probably never heard of The Dark Eye. It's not really your fault — that particular tabletop RPG isn't meant for you. It was made by Germans for other Germans, and it found a lot of success by focusing on that particular niche."

Blackguards uses the fourth edition of those rules, and it doesn't water them down. Dice rolls decide whether you hit or miss, exactly like at a table. Attributes matter. Specialisations matter. And the game barely explains any of it — which is either a flaw or the most authentic tabletop experience possible, depending on your mood.

It also makes a choice most Dark Eye games avoid: it leaves the high fantasy parts of Aventuria behind and drops you in the wild south — Mengbilla, Loch Harodrôl, and a region literally named The Green Hell.

For me this hits differently: The Dark Eye was the very first tabletop RPG I ever bought, back when playing around a real table with real dice was still the golden age. Seeing it turned into this was something special.

Playing the Bad Guys

Traitor, murderer, mercenary, gladiator… that's what you are in Blackguards. So prepare to kill plenty of civilians, guards and creatures on your journey. But you'll also end up as a defender, a protector of the poor — it's a rollercoaster of good and evil, making critical decisions and being hunted by bounty hunters while trying to save the world.

The setup: you're accused of murdering a princess you called a friend. You have no memory of the night she died. You escape execution alongside Naurim, a foul-tempered dwarf jailed for murder by arson, and Zurbaran Florios, an enslaved mage and incurable womaniser locked up for impersonating his former masters. Charming company. 🤣

Having been a fan of the Drakensang series, you'll find the same skill tree in Blackguards. You gain experience after each battle and spend it across weapons, magic, survival or special manoeuvres.

But the experience isn't tied to how many enemies you kill. Some battles have never-ending waves of foes — which means you have other objectives to complete during the fight, and as long as those aren't fulfilled, enemies keep appearing. Killing them won't raise the experience you earn from that battle one bit.

Many environmental elements can be used, like smashing a pillar holding up a pile of rocks to let the stones fall and crush your enemies. Most of these will kill your foes far faster than your sword ever could, and on Hard mode you'll be using a lot of them. If you don't, it's just impossible to win in the hardest mode...

The Dark Souls of Turn-Based RPGs

Some battles are really fucking hard, and even if you're good at strategy, you'll also need a bit of luck.

There are genuine difficulty spikes in Blackguards.

You'll cruise through ten battles… and then one fight makes you explode with rage.

Honestly? At the start of almost every encounter I found myself thinking "is this game taking the piss? There's no way to win this." And then, fight after fight, through pure stubborn strategy… you win anyway.

That feeling is the whole reason this game exists ! 😍

Here's my favourite example, and I'm not proud of it...

There was one battle I won for exactly one reason: I had one more movement point than my opponent. That's it. So every single turn, I ran, opened up one hexagon of distance, fired a crossbow bolt, and ran again. Over and over, for the entire fight. A turn-based version of what MMO players call kiting. And that i did a lot with my Bard in Everquest 1 😏

Not exactly a technique you brag about at parties. But a win is a win — sometimes substance beats style 😉

And that trick only works because Blackguards uses a hexagonal grid, not a square one.

Six directions instead of four changes every distance calculation in the game. On a square grid, that one extra movement point would probably have got me killed. And i would have abandonned the game... 😤

Earning experience is a slow process in The Dark Eye, and so it is here. Becoming all-powerful won't happen before the second half of the game at the earliest — and even when some battles start feeling easy, you can be certain the game has a brutal fight lined up for you soon enough.

Blackguards is divided into 5 chapters, and every one of them raises the difficulty — sometimes a little too sharply right at the start. These are spikes the devs put there deliberately, just to remind you they can kill you at any time. Sometimes you'll even need to learn new skills just to survive.

As an example: if a warrior specialises too heavily in melee, that becomes a genuine weakness, because sooner or later he'll stumble into a mission where ranged weapons would have saved the day. Some battles will also require your characters to run around kiting your foes — running faster than them, firing an arrow, running, firing again.

Frenzy, Poisons and the Knockdown Arrow

As for the spellcasters, some of their strongest spells can't be learned until a certain point in the game. And that's a good thing, because it forces you to lean even harder on strategy.

Take the spell called Frenzy, which turns your foes against each other while also preventing enemy spellcasters from casting anything at all, since they're too busy being frenzied. If you could have learned that early on… it would have been devastating, and frankly far too easy. So on that point the devs took the right decision to lock it up before a certain chapter.

That, incidentally, is exactly one of the problems with Blackguards 2 — but that's a story for another article.

General skills matter enormously — things like Willpower, which keeps you from accumulating injuries and ending up with crippled heroes who can't land a single blow, or Warcraft (no, not the game), which lets your heroes switch between melee and ranged weapons without paying an extra turn for it.

There are potions you can strap to your belt, traps you can lay during a battle, and poisons you can apply before one. Poisons can genuinely save your life in certain fights. Traps, on the other hand, I found time-consuming and not that effective.

But the real prize? Knockdown arrows and bolts. There's only a limited supply in the entire game, but an arrow that floors anyone on a single hit is your way out of the worst encounters in the game. Save them. You'll know when you need them.

Always Outnumbered, Never Quite Outgunned

In Blackguards you are always outnumbered.

And it's an intense feeling — knowing you have to find the one path that reverses the situation.

Every single battle looks too hard at first glance. It always seems like the fight is already lost and that you must have made a mistake somewhere earlier. But no. You take a proper look at the surroundings, and suddenly you know there's a way to survive. Human nature can move mountains if you stimulate the feeling of hope

— and Blackguards does that better than almost anything I've played.

There are also plenty of side quests, some of which only appear in certain towns during certain chapters.

So you travel from one town to another on the map and get the pleasant surprise of finding things have changed — a band of guards with a problem, for instance, and of course you'll offer them your services 😏 It feels like returning to a place you thought you'd completely cleared out. But the devs had more in store for you!

As always in The Dark Eye, the main plot eventually revolves around the Dragon Cult, which means fighting your way through hordes of humanoid lizards. That was already the case in Drakensang, and generally it means a solid story and real background — because you'll be digging into the dark secrets of Aventuria.

Blackguards 1, and the Sequel We Don't Talk About

Blackguards is an excellent game for anyone chasing a good story, a slow but genuinely satisfying evolution of your heroes, and real challenges that force you to rethink your strategy over and over. And for fans of The Dark Eye, you simply can't walk past it. Maybe it'll even give you the urge to go back and play Drakensang and its prequel.

I say Blackguards the first deliberately, because I've also completed Blackguards 2. And where I'd give this one a 4.2, the sequel gets a 3 from me — it was missing many of the best features of the original. It's as if the game had been stripped of every good idea and then shipped too early. Business reasons, maybe?

The first one, though, remains a great experience — and one of the most distinctive tactical RPGs ever made.

Small note: the voice actor for your male protagonist is, if my ears didn't deceive me, the same one who voiced Hawke in Dragon Age 2 and Dragon Age: Inquisition. As a huge fan of the Dragon Age series — with well over 100 hours on Inquisition alone — I was very happy to hear that voice again.

What Happened to Daedalic

I usually end these Hidden Gem articles by telling you what became of the studio. This one hurts differently — because Daedalic didn't fade away quietly. They went out on the loudest possible failure.

In May 2023, Daedalic released The Lord of the Rings: Gollum. You may have heard about it — it scored 34 on Metacritic on PS5, with user scores around 1.1. It became a byword for disaster.

The studio issued a public apology within days...

A month later, it was over. In June-July 2023, Daedalic shut down its internal development studio in Hamburg for good. Twenty-five of their ninety-plus staff were let go. A second, unannounced Lord of the Rings project — which had already received more than two million euros in German government funding — was cancelled outright. The company survives today, but purely as a publisher. They don't make games anymore.

And here's the detail that made me sit back in my chair: Daedalic was a subsidiary of Nacon. The same Nacon whose collapse took down Spiders, the French studio behind Steelrising, which I wrote about on this very same website.

So there it is. The studio that made two hundred hand-crafted battlefields, that turned Germany's national tabletop RPG into one of the hardest and most inventive tactical games I've ever played — that studio no longer makes games. Not because Blackguards failed. Because years later, someone upstairs decided a stealth game about Gollum was a good idea.

Buy Blackguards. It's a decade old, it's cheap, and it's the work of people who genuinely knew what they were doing — before someone above them stopped listening... Always the same story right ? 😏

+ Around 200 hand-crafted battlefields — not one is recycled
+ Battles designed like adventure-game puzzles. Nothing else feels like it.
+ The Dark Eye rules, uncompromised and undiluted
+ Brutal difficulty that always turns out to be beatable
+ A genuinely good story with a proper Aventuria background

---

- Vicious difficulty spikes, especially early in each chapter
- The rules are barely explained — expect to learn the hard way
- Traps are largely a waste of your time
- Blackguards 2 threw away most of what made this one great
- The studio that made it doesn't make games anymore