Welcome to Risen. There’s a very brief intro cutscene I’ll probably record later, but really this game doesn’t have much of a plot, and what little it has is mostly retconned by its sequels.
: We wake up on a mysterious island as a random bald asshole who is ultimately going to turn into the island’s greatest weedlord. Maybe. And no, I’m not mis-using that term. Most of the people on this beach are dead, except for that one lady.
: The two men in front of us are dead. Each of them have a couple of items: this guy has a few gold pieces, a ring (worth ~20 gold) and a bottle of wine. Unlike Risen 2, where alcohol serves as a health potion, in Risen 1 it only increases mana. We won’t be able to actually use mana for a long time.
: There’s a trail of gold coins near the bodies, as well as a couple of healing potions. The coin trail leads out into the water, where..
: We promptly get grabbed by a sea monster that tosses us back onto land. The game has a name for this thing, but I forget what it is. The sea monster is useful for one reason: if anything had been aggroed onto us, getting grabbed by the sea monster resets aggro.
: There’s also a bunch of mussels down by the shoreline. Some of them have pearls in them, which sell for around 15 gold each. They’re pre-programmed, as is pretty much everything in this game, so the same mussels will always have pearls in them.
: Right near Sara is a big tree branch that has limbs we can break off and use as a simple club. Risen has three weapon types: sword, axe, and staff. Swords are the fastest and usually the most damaging, axes are slow and shitty, and staves have an extremely janky attack animation and usually do less damage than swords.
: What we really want is on a body going east down the coast from where Sara is. This corpse has a hunting knife, which has an attack rating of 12 compared to the club’s 8. You’ll also notice the strength requirement. The only stat requirement weapons in Risen have is strength, and pretty much every build is going to need at least some investment in it.
: To the west of Sara is a pair of killer seagulls. These seagulls are actually fairly deadly.
: This is one hit from a seagull. Seagulls have a pretty simple attack pattern: they come in to hit you anywhere from one to five times, and then jump backward to avoid a counterattack. The working strategy for killing them is to back them into a wall and slash until they die. The tip the game gives us is outright wrong, by the way. Parrying only works with enemies that are wielding weapons.
: Here, I took maybe three hits from the seagull before killing it. The way our protagonist’s attack works, we get two horizontal slashes followed by a vertical slash which has a huge damage multiplier on it.
: Now, here’s a little secret I didn’t find until.. probably the third time I played through this intro sequence. If you go straight behind where the seagull was, there’s a rusty sword (10 attack) and a shield sitting against this tree. We want that shield.
: The shield adds two points to blade and blunt resistance, and also allows us to block attacks. Blocking completely negates damage, and makes our guard much harder to break. Unfortunately, you can only use a shield with a sword - staves and axes are two-handed weapons.
: This conversation goes a bit differently if you have a weapon already, but the difference is negligible.
: First quest done, 25 EXP gained. Risen is a little weird with EXP - enemies don’t respawn, but they usually give way more experience than finishing a quest. The seagull we killed gave us twice as much EXP as finishing this.
: If we hadn’t found a weapon before talking to her, Sara would send us to find one before we continue on. I thought at first that doing that got you more experience, but I tested it and it doesn’t.
: Sara is now following us. The way NPCs in this game work is.. really weird. I’ll get into that later, but the important thing is that Sara is completely invincible. She has a health bar, but can’t take damage. Most important NPCs are like this.
: Just up the path from where we found Sara, we find a wolf munching on a dead guy. This is a standard thing pretty much every animal enemy in the game will do if they come across a corpse.
: Wolves are particularly annoying because they have a side-dash thing that might as well be a teleport. The best strategy is to keep your shield up, wait for them to attack, and then combo them to death - even at base stats, our character can kill them in one combo provided all three strikes hit.
: I like how her first reaction is “At least we have meat!” and then calls the wolf a rat. Also, wolves don’t drop meat.
: What she’s probably confusing it for is this thing, which is on a slightly different path from the wolf. There’s two paths you can take to leave this area, and this is the other one from where the wolf was.
: Stingrats are kind of a kick in the dick. They usually come in packs of three or four, and are low enough to the ground that they can “dodge” some attacks which hit too high. You can’t aim your melee attacks to compensate for this, either.
: The stingrat is guarding a particularly valuable item. Druid’s hemlocks are mushrooms that increase your maximum health by 1 when eaten. You can turn them into potions if you build yourself to do that which increase your health by 10, but… it’s not worth it. Just eat them and get the 1HP.
: If we go up this way, there’s a cave full of gnolls. We could fight them, but we’re at really low health and gnolls are a pain in the ass to fight. Also..
: The “different way” is back where we came from, which leads uphill. There’s a back entrance to the gnoll cave on the left, but we don’t want to go in there quite yet as we currently lack any means of healing outside of some rather expensive potions.
: The game just keeps tossing wolves and stingrats at us, but eventually..
: If you’re wondering about the weird lighting, by the way.. the game does this thing in the tutorial zone (which is basically the beach up to this house) where it has a thunderstorm overlaid across the standard daylight weather.
: This house has something special behind it - a water barrel. Like Prince of Persia, drinking water from a barrel will heal us. Strangely enough, you can find water as a generic healing item, but it heals mana instead of health. Early on, water barrels are a godsend - but once you start increasing your max HP, it can take like 5 straight minutes of drinking from one to fully restore your health bar.
: Inside the house is a bunch of junk. Risen has no carry limits and merchants will pay gold for absolutely everything, so there’s no reason not to pick up stuff and sell it. What we’re looking for though is this key.
: The key allows us to open this locked chest on the second floor. We also level up in the process. Levelling in Risen is kind of shit. For now, all it does is give us some extra HP.
: There’s not much of note inside the chest except for that last item, which is a frying pan. Risen has a couple of tools you can pick up - most of them are only good if you have a specific skill to use them with. The frying pan is one that doesn’t need a skill. As long as we have one, we can cook meat on a fire. We have five raw steaks and four raw chicken: stingrats drop steaks and seagulls drop chicken for some reason.
: Here’s the cooking menu. At first, all we can do is cook meat or fish on a fire. There’s a separate type of cooking later on that involves finding recipes and that I’ve never really bothered with. Right now we want to fry up exactly one piece of meat. This is important for a sidequest coming up.
: While the logical thing to do would be to stick together, Sara is an immortal demigod who cares not for the plight of mortals. I’m not even making this shit up.
: Welcome to Chapter 1. You’d think, given the fact that this game has chapters, that it would have several of them. In fact, this is the first chapter of three and covers probably half the story by itself.
: The path to continue onward is just behind the house. Hilariously, there’s a line somewhere between where the house is and here where the storm stops, but if you go back over the line the storm starts back up again.
: At the top of that path is a little ruin, which has a new enemy type outside. Grave moths are probably the least annoying of the non-human enemy types. They fly at roughly sword height, and tend to bunch up so that you can hit several of them at once. The only annoying thing is that they sometimes try to flank you. With our current stats, it takes four hits to kill them: one combo and a single extra hit. I’m going to skip going into the ruin because there’s not much interesting inside. This area has a second shield in it if you missed the first one.
: Up the hill from the ruin is a second house, which you might think is the first house but absolutely isn’t. This house is a useful landmark when navigating the main game area, because it’s more or less right in the middle of the map.
: It also has a water barrel. Let’s just go into the house and see what we can loot.
: Great. We’ve got a guy holding us up with a hunting knife. This is by far one of the weirdest cutscenes in this game - Jan here is just pressed against the wall until someone walks in. There’s a dialog option, but two of the options loop and only one allows progress.
: Here we get reintroduced to what was in the opening cutscene.
: The key we need is in the cupboard on the opposite wall from where Jan was standing. Why the developers thought it was a good idea to repeat the same “puzzle” twice, I have no idea. My guess is that this was probably meant to be the tutorial house, but then they re-designed it and just moved it instead of throwing it out.
: Upstairs is a locked chest with a sword, some ammo, a lockpick, and a partial map of the island. What’s weird to me is that Jan, and most of the people belonging to the faction he’s a part of, all use rusty swords rather than just.. regular ones.
: If you know what you’re doing, this sword will last you exactly five minutes until you find something better. I had a run of this where I kept it for the entirety of Chapter 1.
: We have two choices, but the bottom one only gets us a “I’ll go check on her at some point when I have time” and a bit of EXP. Plus, you’ll need to know more about the island to understand the upcoming vote.
: So, without spoiling anything, let me sort of explain how the factions in this game work. Jan won’t tell us too much about them right now, but this game actually has three factions.. sort of. He also doesn’t do a great job at presenting the fact that the Swamp and Harbor Town are not a binary choice. To fully understand them, I’ll also have to show you our stat chart.
: This is from the beginning of the game. You’ll notice that we start with one point in each of the weapon skills - this is because you need one point to use a given weapon type - we couldn’t use crystal magic, as an example, even if we had the item for it.
: As I said, Risen has three factions: the Don’s Men, the Inquisition, and the Mages (the latter two are usually collectively referred to as “The White Cloaks”). The Don’s Men are for people who want to play Risen like Gothic: they focus on weapons and only weapons - specifically swords and axes. The White Cloaks, on the other hand, focus on staves and magic. Each faction has certain skills that are exclusive to them.
: With that, there’s two ways we can go. Our character can either become the Supreme Weedlord of the Swamp (and use plenty of cheesy glitches and exploits doing it) or join the White Cloaks and study ancient runes to become a wizard. I’ll let you, the reader, pick. Voting for this will close the moment we hit Harbor Town, which will be several updates from now. Vote for either Weedlord or Wizard.