Operencia The Stolen Sun Review — Forgotten Fairy Tale

Operencia: The Stolen Sun, originally released on Steam on March 31, 2020 — a year after console and Epic Store.

A first-person dungeon crawler where you move tile by tile, fight turn-based battles, and explore a world built entirely from Hungarian folklore. Roughly 45 hours of pure pleasure — one of the most unfairly forgotten RPGs I've ever played.

Wait — This Was Made by a PINBALL Studio?

Here's the detail that changes how you look at this entire game, and I only learned it years after finishing it.

Operencia was made by Zen Studios. If that name means nothing to you, let me help: they're the people behind Pinball FX and Zen Pinball. Over a hundred licensed pinball tables. Star Wars Pinball. Marvel Pinball. Official collaborations with Lucasfilm and NBC Universal. In the world of digital pinball, Zen Studios is the industry.

And one day, this Budapest-based pinball team decided to build a first-person dungeon crawler in the tradition of Wizardry and Dungeon Master. Operencia became the single biggest production in the studio's 15-year history.

Think about that for a second. When I said above that "made for RPG fans" was a big claim — I had no idea how big. This wasn't a veteran RPG studio flexing. This was a team that made flippers and bumpers for a living, walking into one of the most demanding, most gate-kept genres in gaming… and landing it.

Honestly? Knowing this makes me respect the result even more. Because nothing in Operencia feels like a side project. Everything is polished like a jewel — and now I know why: it was the game they'd been waiting 15 years to make.

A World That Refuses to Be Grey

Here's the paradox at the heart of Operencia: the entire premise is that someone stole the sun. The land is plunged into permanent darkness. Doom is coming. And yet…

Go back and look at my screenshots. Really look at them...

Emerald green in the flooded ruins. Ember orange in the caverns. Glacier blue in the crystal tunnels. Amethyst purple in the mineral caves. Deep midnight blue around the World Tree, lit like a stained-glass window. And by the end — rust-orange industrial pipes, in a game that started in a fairy tale forest.

Every single zone has its own palette. Not one of them is grey. Not one of them is the brown-and-bloom soup that so many fantasy RPGs drown in. The developers themselves said they were proud of having built "a relatively bright world"— which, as they put it, is saying something for a land whose sun has literally been stolen.

And it's not just colour. There's a second artistic choice most people never mention:

the story cutscenes are hand-painted illustrations, not 3D. Static, storybook-style paintings with narration underneath, like someone reading you a tale. It sounds cheap on paper. In practice it's the exact opposite — it makes you feel like you're inside a book of folktales, which is precisely what this game is.

"Operencia" Literally Means "Far, Far Away"

I played 45 hours of this game without ever knowing what its title meant. Let me fix that for you.

In Hungarian, "Operencia" means "far, far away." It's the faraway land referenced in hundreds of Central European folktales, passed down orally for centuries. It's their "once upon a time, in a kingdom far away…" — the title of this game is literally the opening line of every fairy tale you heard as a child.

And once you know that, the whole game reorganises itself in your head.

Zen Studios is Hungarian, based in Budapest, and they built this world out of the folklore they grew up with — stories the Western world has essentially never seen in a video game.

• Napkirály, the abducted Sun King, comes from a real Hungarian belief in an actual Sun King visible in the sky by day.
• The 13 maps of the game are each built around a specific folktale or myth the developers were raised on.
• Some locations are completely real: the fortress of Deva and Balvanyos exist
  — you can go and visit their ruins today.
• Real historical figures appear in legendary form:
  -Attila, King of the Huns, his wife Réka, and the Seven Chieftains of the Magyars.
• Your own companions are pulled from forgotten tales — the brave knight Mezey, Sebastian the Dragon Slayer.
• Even the táltos, the shaman figure of Hungarian folklore, is a playable class.

No other RPG does this. Everyone mines Norse, Greek or Arthurian myth until there's nothing left. Operencia is, to my knowledge, the first game to gather Central European folklore into one coherent universe — and it does it without a single wink at the camera. It just… tells you these stories, straight, like they've always been there.

That's the part that stayed with me long after I forgot the puzzles.

Your Party: Seven Heroes, But Only Four at a Time

At the start you only create one character — yourself.

No, I am not Black... 😅 But my son is Metis! And i wanted my Avatar to look like my son when he will be older 🥰 Actually if another game would have proposed me to play a Black Woman... then i would have thought to my daughter 😍

As you progress, you'll recruit more members, up to 4 active at the same time out of seven total.

Each member has their own strengths, but here's my honest gripe: the three best companions are the ones you only find in the second half of the game. It's almost as if the first three were placeholders — a teaser before the real party shows up.

So once I had those last three, I never touched the first three again. And that's a shame, because I would have wanted the game to force me to use every one of them at some point. My benched members kept gaining experience, quietly levelling up in the background, without ever being needed in a fight.

I did bring one of the "weak" ones back, exactly once — and only to solve a small puzzle.

Secrets, Puzzles and the Art of Coming Back Later

Operencia is loaded with little secrets and puzzles.

And the best part is that you're always rewarded — experience and treasure — for finding a secret or solving a riddle. You can even earn experience by exploring a map to 100%, meaning discovering every single tile.

From an explorer's and completionist's point of view, Operencia does everything right. Each zone even keeps score for you: secrets found, chest sets completed, map percentage, campfires discovered. If you're the type who can't leave a corner unturned, this game was built for your particular illness 😄

Speaking of secrets, Operencia has an interesting concept: you can travel back and forth as much as you want. You can return to a previous dungeon to find a secret or solve a puzzle you couldn't handle before — because in every location, there'll be something you simply can't do until you find the right artefact or tool. And it will be somewhere else entirely.

Which is exactly why, when you're not familiar with the concept, you can waste hours trying to crack a puzzle that literally cannot be solved yet. Real example: in the very first dungeon there's a statue you can interact with… and the solution to that puzzle is in the very last dungeon of the game 😅

So here's my one piece of advice:

can't find a secret? Can't solve a situation? Unless you're truly stuck, write it down on a piece of paper, move on, and come back later. Out of my 45 hours, I reckon I burned 2 full hours hunting for solutions that didn't exist yet.

Most puzzles come down to logic — though sometimes the devs' logic is a little far-fetched. But I guess artificially stretching a game's lifespan is forgivable when it's done this well. I've seen far worse (Lands of Lore 2, I'm looking at you 🙃).

The Cauldron: Alchemy as a Puzzle

There's one feature I have to single out, because it's smarter than it has any right to be: the Cauldron.

You don't buy potions in Operencia. You find recipes — and those recipes give you clues, not instructions. You then have to work out which ingredients to use and in what order, following the logic the clue hints at. Morphology, effect, stabiliser: each slot changes what comes out the other end.

It's a genuinely entertaining way to turn crafting into a puzzle, and like every secret in this game, you're rewarded with experience when you successfully complete a new recipe. But only once — after that, the potion is permanently yours for the rest of the game.

You'll only need to refill it at the campfire after use, like an "Estus Flask" in Dark Souls 😉

Fighting in Operencia: Ambush or Be Ambushed

Even though we're in a dungeon crawler, the battles are tactical and turn-based, like in Might & Magic.

So how do they start? While exploring, you'll see a creature wandering from point A to point B. Stand a little too long in its field of vision and it charges you — and the first round won't be yours. But stay out of its way, watch from a distance, wait for it to turn… and approach from behind. Now you get the ambush, and a full free round 😎

Also, one wandering creature never means one opponent. Expect a minimum of 2 enemies, up to 5 — and that's before the summoners. Yes, some enemies can call in reinforcements, and you can get overwhelmed very quickly.

As for the difficulty, it depends whether you picked the harder setting at the start. I did, and let me tell you it demanded a serious amount of gear customisation and real tactical decisions in combat.

One oddity worth flagging: the difficulty curve isn't linear at all. I found late-game areas easier than places I'd cleared much earlier. It all depends on the special attacks and powers of certain creatures, which can be absolutely vicious even when the creature itself looks harmless... I remember a particular type of Zombie... a Real pain in the ass 😤

The Gold Problem, and the Optional Bosses

All the gold you find in Operencia is useful for buying new gear...

— but not that much, and not before you're roughly 30% into the game.

I did spend some of my gold on the available stock, but most of the time the items you find by uncovering the game's secrets are far better than anything the shops sell.

That's maybe the one real downside here, so don't count too heavily on your purse.

There are of course boss battles at the end of every location you visit, and some are entirely optional. But the more you explore and the more you kill, the better the loot 😉 And if you're an old-school player like me, you know very well that an optional boss is, most of the time, a pain-in-the-ass boss. Optional doesn't mean easy.

All in all, Operencia was a very pleasant surprise and deserved a much warmer welcome than it got. And should I mention the soundtrack? The music is like everything else here — every composition polished like a jewel, reflecting the fairy tale you're walking through. When a game is this well made from A to Z, you can be sure the experience will hold together.

Actually the composer noticed my little review and expressed his Thank you about it

Frankly ? I am the one who needs to Thank You Arthur ☺️

So Why Has Nobody Heard of It?

Here's the part that genuinely annoys me, and I only understood it while digging back into this game years later.

Operencia didn't fail. It was buried.

The game launched on March 29, 2019 — on Xbox One and PC. But on PC it was locked behind a one-year Epic Games Store exclusivity. No Steam page. No Steam reviews. No Steam wishlists. No Steam discovery algorithm. At the exact moment when half the PC crowd was actively boycotting Epic on principle.

By the time it finally reached Steam and GOG on March 31, 2020, the moment had passed.

A year-old game, no launch buzz, no review cycle, competing against everything else releasing that week. That's how a genuinely excellent RPG becomes invisible.

And that's exactly why I found it the way I did: not through a review, not through an ad, but through a random comment buried in a Steam discussion thread. Someone happened to mention it. That's it. That's the entire marketing funnel that brought me 45 hours of one of the best fairy-tale RPGs ever made.

How many other games are sitting there right now, just as good, waiting for one random comment? 😭

Where Zen Studios Is Now (a Rare Happy Ending)

I've written too many sad updates lately. Piranha Bytes is gone. Spiders is gone...

So let me give you a different ending for once. Zen Studios is still standing!

Founded in Budapest in 2003, around 65-70 developers strong. They were acquired by Embracer Group in late 2020 via Saber Interactive — and when Embracer later sold Saber off in 2024 during its brutal restructuring, Zen Studios was one of the studios Embracer specifically chose to keep. They're still there. Still making games.

The bad news, and it's the reason I'm writing this at all: there is no Operencia 2.

No sequel announced, no sequel in development, nothing. The studio went back to what pays the bills, and the world of Operencia has been sitting untouched ever since.

And that stings, because they built something nobody else has:

An entire mythology that had never been put in a video game before, with the world map shaped like the World Tree itself, thirteen handcrafted regions, and a folklore well that is nowhere near dry.

So Zen Studios — if you ever read this: you're one of the very few studios in this industry sitting on a genuinely original universe. Not another Norse pantheon. Not another Arthurian rehash. Your own grandparents' stories. Please go back to Operencia one day. Some of us are still waiting 🌞 But i guess Embracer will have its say in the matter... 😏

+ Central European folklore no other RPG has ever touched
+ Every zone has its own palette — a visual feast
+ Puzzles, secrets and a cauldron system that actually rewards you
+ Made by a pinball studio, and it shows in the polish
+ A soundtrack polished like a jewel

---

- The three best party members arrive far too late
- Shop gear is outclassed by anything you find yourself
- Some puzzles can't be solved until many hours later
- Buried by a one-year Epic exclusivity — and never recovered
- No sequel. None. Still waiting.