Masquerada: Songs and Shadows – a triple-A indie. RPGs you might have wrongly skipped

Witchcraft Hour studio enjoys good reputation on the mobile market thanks to a series of turn-based strategy games Ravenmark. Inspired by these successes, the authors decided to try their hand at creating a new game from scratch – for the PC. The result was Masquerada: Songs and Shadows. The game met the expectations in terms of quality, but it unfortunately failed to become a commercial success.

The game takes us to a beautifully designed city with unique architecture, history and strange customs. It's supposedly fantasy, but this is not another formulaic clone of the Middle-Earth. Also, the plot itself departs from the usual, established paths of the RPG genre, with an emphasis on investigation and intrigue, rather than an epic adventure.

The focus of the game is mainly combat. Battles take place in real-time with an active pause, which provides greater tactical freedom – also thanks to the wide variety of tactics used by the team members. The campaign is relatively linear, but at the same time substantial, with interesting a few good twists.

Additionally, the overall quality of Masquerada: Songs and Shadows is top-notch. Two-dimensional backgrounds often look fantastic, and the characters, though three-dimensional, were stylized for a catroonish, cell-shaded look, so that they compliment the environments. Combined with an impressive soundtrack and great voice acting, this gives the game a much higher audiovisual quality than we usually expect from indie RPG titles.

Mages of Mystralia – a dynamic action-RPG

People looking for something fresh in action RPG should turn to Mages of Mystralia. The game takes place in a fantasy world where people with magical talents are approached with fear and loathing. A young girl has the misfortune of being born as one of these individuals (she's the protagonist), and is banished from her hometown once the inhabitants discover her abilities.

The production has fantastic, cute, cell-shaded graphics, as well as a beautifully designed world and plot. Which isn't a huge surprise, since the latter two elements were designed by Ed Greenwood, the father of the Forgotten Realms , which remain the most popular universe of the Dungeons & Dragons family.

Above all, however, the biggest attraction of Mages of Mystralia is the mechanics. As befits an RPG, we spend most of the time fighting. The difference here is that we can only use spells. During the game, we collect runes that activate certain magical effects, and they can be freely combined, which leads to the discovering new spells.

Combine that with rather high tempo of the game. Sometimes it feels like an action game, but the mechanics work perfectly during the game, yielding some really exciting skirmishes.