Druidstone Review Ridiculously Unbalanced or Fair

Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest, released on Steam on May 15, 2019

— by the creators of Legend of Grimrock.

People complain that this game is too hard, even players who have beaten the Dark Souls series. They're not wrong. But they're measuring it with the wrong ruler — and this page is here to hand you the right one.

Is It a Tactical RPG, or a Puzzle Game?

So instead they built seven prototypes — one of which they worked on for six full months before throwing it away — until they landed on Druidstone and went all in. And for the record: Almost Human, the Grimrock studio, technically still exists.

Häkkinen described the relationship between the two companies beautifully — "think of us like members of a band who enjoy this so much that we have a dual membership in another band." A supergroup, basically.

The Grimrock DNA survived the switch to top-down: same lush fantasy art, same orchestral weight.

Frankly, when you launch the game it looks lovely — cute characters, funny dialogue 🙂 And then the first mission starts. And you retry it five times, because you want to complete the bonus objective. And it looks absolutely impossible.

No kidding: I spent twenty minutes on the very first mission just to get that bonus.

Is this a tactical RPG or a puzzle game?!

Turns out that's not a rhetorical question — it's the actual answer. Kotaku nailed it in their review: "Battles can't really be brute-forced so much as solved, trying out different combinations and sequences until you manage to survive long enough to complete the objective. In this regard Druidstone is a lot like Into the Breach — more about unravelling the logic of how a battle will play out and planning around that than seeking out good cover."

They described Druidstone as part of "a new breed of tactical role-playing games that leans more on puzzles". And once you accept that framing, everything about this game stops being unfair and starts being brilliant.

Look at the interface and it's obvious in hindsight. Your bonus objectives are displayed on screen permanently, right next to the main ones. Area-of-effect zones are drawn out in red before you commit. Turn counters warn you when you're on the last round. The game hides nothing from you. It shows you the whole equation and dares you to solve it.

If you lose, you didn't get ambushed by bad luck. You did the maths wrong. That's a puzzle game.

Bonus objectives on screen at all times, damage zones drawn before you commit. The game shows you everything.

The First Five Missions Will Break You

Let me be blunt about the thing nobody warns you about:

1. The first five missions are a pain in the ass.
2. Trust me — the beginning of this game is genuinely not enjoyable.
3. You literally have to think "puzzle game" before "tactical RPG".
4. And that's exactly why so many players complained about it on Steam.
5. Because once you're past that stage… the game becomes a joy. 🙂

This is the single most important thing I can tell you about Druidstone: the difficulty curve is inverted. Most games ease you in and then ramp up. Druidstone throws its hardest wall at you in the first two hours, before you have the tools, the skills or the mindset to climb it — and then gets steadily more manageable as you grow into it.

If you bounced off this game in the first hour, you didn't fail at it. You quit during the worst part.

⚔ PLAYER BUFF AVAILABLE ⚔

Partner link · Lien partenaire

Survival Tips for the Early Game

Here's what I wish someone had told me. Share them around if they help 👍

• At the beginning, think survival, not experience.
• By the end of mission 5, you'll be noticeably stronger.
• You'll have all the time in the world to replay earlier missions later.
• Play on Hard mode anyway. Yes, the start is brutal — but it genuinely gets easier from mission 6, and Hard is where the game is designed to be experienced... Like a Puzzle, and Real life puzzles can take hours if not Days to solve!
• About money: there's an item you can buy early that gives you effectively unlimited coins by replaying mission 1.
• Many missions have a limited number of spawns, even when it feels endless. There is a cap.
• If you can weather the waves, you'll clear the map completely.
• When there's a bottleneck — a door, a narrow passage — use it. Lure them in and kill them one at a time.
• A handful of missions do have unlimited spawns. Be careful...

That bottleneck trick works especially well here because Druidstone uses a square grid, not a hexagonal one. Four orthogonal directions means a one-tile doorway is a genuine chokepoint — something that's much harder to pull off on the hex grids of games like Blackguards.

Protection Missions are not the easiest at all... This game is designed to make you mad anyway 😁

No Shame in Replaying

• Getting all the bonus objectives in one run is rarely realistic.
• That's exactly why you can replay every mission.
• Don't hesitate to run one twice, picking off the bonus goals one at a time when there are several.
• And don't worry about becoming overpowered: the more you replay, the less XP you get. 🙂

That decaying XP is a small design detail that says a lot about how carefully this game was balanced. They wanted you to retry freely without the game collapsing under grinding — so they made replaying free of guilt and free of exploitation.

Too many mobs, not enough turns. That's not a bug — that's the puzzle.

The Missions That Want You to Run

A few missions have unlimited monster spawns, and that changes everything about how you should approach them.

• It means the mission is designed around movement, not attrition.
• Play too slowly and you will be overwhelmed. Guaranteed.
• A lot of players who like to take their time and play relaxed complained bitterly about this on Steam…
• …but I think it's a good idea. It breaks the routine and injects a timer challenge into a genre that rarely has one.
• Survival tactics and relaxed tactics are two very different skills 😉

The game does warn you, incidentally — there's a round counter at the top of the screen, and it'll tell you outright when you're on your last round. If you got caught out, the information was there. You just weren't reading it.

⚔ PLAYER BUFF AVAILABLE ⚔

Partner link · Lien partenaire

The Skills That Actually Matter

• Always position your Warden so he can use Guard.
• Don't underestimate your basic Teleport ability.
• Focus genuinely raises your spells to the next level.
• Regenerate is what makes endurance battles survivable.
• Crowd control — Forcefield, Sleep, Freeze, Mind Control — is a straight-up must-take. Not optional.
• Free movement abilities like Dash and Shift are critical on any mission involving timers.

And here's the mechanic that ties all of this together: you can completely reorganise your skill sets between missions. That's not a convenience feature — it's the core loop. Each level demands a targeted approach, so rearranging your build before a fight isn't cheating, it's the intended way to play. Treat your party as a toolbox you reconfigure for each puzzle, not as characters you level in one direction.

Frankly, there were situations where I still don't know how I got out alive...

A whole grid of abilities per character — and you're meant to rewire it between every single mission.

Outnumbered by Design

• At first, most fights will look wildly unfair… right up until you work out how to win them 😉
• Sometimes you have to sacrifice a party member purely to buy yourself the turns you need to prevail.
• Remember that a knocked-out member can always be brought back.
• Though avoiding knockouts entirely is sometimes part of the bonus objectives, so choose your sacrifices knowingly.

That tension — between winning the mission and winning it perfectly — is the whole game. Anyone can survive a Druidstone battle eventually. Surviving it while hitting every bonus goal in the allotted turns is where it becomes a chess problem with a soundtrack.

A Word on Paying for It

Like almost every game released on Steam, Druidstone was cracked. I have no idea whether it hurt them; all I hope is that the positive feedback came from paying customers. Because remember this is a two-person studio...

Not a publisher with a marketing department and a cushion. When I wrote about Paper Sorcerer — another little gem, built by one man — piracy was a real part of why its developer never made a second game. At this scale, every unpaid copy isn't a rounding error on a spreadsheet. It's a fraction of whether these people get to keep doing this.

Druidstone costs around €21. For its lifespan and its craft, that's a fair price.

Developers have to be paid for their hard work. Period.

Sometimes there is a Zoom when you activate a special skill, it's not a long game... It's just Hard like in the 80's!

Where Ctrl Alt Ninja Went

I usually end these articles with bad news. A studio shut down, a publisher collapsed, a developer who gave up. Not this time. 🎉 Even though Ctrl Alt Ninja has been quiet since 2019, the official Druidstone site has an expired certificate, and the social media accounts stopped. But nobody died here. No bankruptcy, no layoffs, no publisher pulling the plug 😅

Petri Häkkinen — the man who designed, programmed and wrote Druidstone — went on to work on Alan Wake 2. One of the most acclaimed games of 2023. Not a bad landing.

And these days, for the sheer love of it, he's building a game called "The Fall of the Black Mage" — designed to run within the constraints of a Commodore VIC-20. A machine from 1980 with five kilobytes of RAM. He's also working on his own game engine, and has hinted he's got an idea for something new brewing.

So no, there's no Druidstone 2 on the horizon. And no Grimrock 3 either. But the people who made these games are alive, working, and still chasing the same itch — one of them just happens to be scratching it on hardware older than most of us... Yeah even me! I think the oldest computer i touched was a C64 😉

After Piranha Bytes, Spiders, Daedalic and a one-man studio called Ultra Runaway, it feels good to write an ending where nothing was lost... Doesn't mean we're not waiting impatiently though!

This was a Hybrid between a Review and a Guide (different format)

• Don't let the difficulty crush your motivation. Past those first brutal missions, the mechanics click and the game becomes genuinely great.
• There are only 35 missions, but on Hard mode they'll take you hours each.
• The Grimrock devs know how to keep us entertained, and Druidstone is no exception. And at €21, that's a good price for what you get.

Liked it ? Then these are worth your time: Age of Decadence and Dungeon Rats, both from Iron Tower Studio. Brutal Old School tactic Rpgs 😎