Like a battle-hardened mercenary caught up in another foolish adventure, Wartales hides its colorful inner life behind a grim and cryptic facade. This player-driven RPG is rendered with an unflinching aesthetic and has no typical central storyline, nor is it defined by any single trait. We know we'll be feeding the crows before the week is out.

But if you survive long enough to penetrate its tough exterior, you will discover a game built from a thousand little ideas. These ideas will accumulate over time and become your own personal journey; they won't be as wacky as Kenshi or as grandiose as Mount & Blade, but they will be more personal and attached to the party you've created.

In Wartales, you lead a newly formed band of mercenaries in a war-torn low fantasy realm. Your goal is simply to protect the interests of the band and to increase the power and prestige of the gang by exploiting the chaos in the kingdom. How you do this is largely up to you. Where you go, who you scout, how you make money, where you camp at night.

In fact, the decision-making process begins even before the game begins, as Wartales offers several ways to play. There are two difficulty settings, turn-based combat and survival simulation, and you can decide how often you want to save your progress. The choice that will most affect your experience, however, is whether to play with level scaling, where the game tries to challenge you according to your abilities, or to keep the levels region-locked and increase the difficulty as you push toward the edge of the world.

In my opinion, region locking is preferable. Wartales consists of the same two layers, whichever way you play it. The top layer is a mount-and-blades-style overworld, in which you move from place to place, visiting various landmarks such as villages, farmhouses, and ruined fortresses. Movement around the map is limited by a stamina meter. When stamina runs out, you need to rest, otherwise your companions will collapse from exhaustion.

If you so desire, you can collapse around the campfire and wait until your stamina meter recovers. However, your companions will not appreciate that. They expect to be fed at every stop and rewarded every three stops. The more companions they have in camp, the more food and money they distribute at these intervals.

In short, cakes and coins are the two key resources needed to continue the adventure. How you obtain these is up to you. The easiest way is to go to the nearest inn and earn some contracts from the bounty board. Pay a few coins for chores like killing local bandits or passing messages to other villages. Or you can hunt animals in the forests of Warthales, eat their meat and sell their pelts for cash. Or they can turn to crime, stealing food from under the noses of market vendors or gold from other travelers wandering the map.

While the route you take through the world is your own, certain experiences are universal. Inevitably, the path you choose will lead to battle; when the sword is drawn in Wartales, the game switches to a turn-based combat map. Like the game as a whole, the combat seems unremarkable at first, but it turns out to be impressively open-ended. Before the battle begins, you can place your troops around the battlefield, choose which units attack first, and then use them in any order you wish. They can also place any combination of movement points, basic attacks, and special abilities, and continue to combine them until they are all exhausted.

This flexibility extends to the way units fight. A character's fighting style is influenced by a variety of factors, including his or her base class, the skills he or she has unlocked, and the weapons he or she has equipped. You can also choose how to recover your heroism points, which are used to perform special abilities. They can be recovered by defeating the enemy, by engaging the enemy (i.e., not being able to retreat without risking damage), or by standing next to a friendly or enemy unit to end a turn.

Despite this flexibility, combat is seldom easy. There are only so many hits a unit can take before it is in mortal danger, and the team's valor points are pooled, so careful thought must be given to when to use them. The basic tactic is to engage the enemy with units with high defensive skills and ambush them from behind with units with high DPS for bonus damage. But after a few hours of play, my best ranger (and group captain) unlocked the ability to drop smoke clouds. For the next few hours, my main tactic was to engage clumps of enemies and use the Held's smoke ability to chip away as much of their strength as possible.

As units become more skilled and new strategic avenues open up, approaches to combat will always evolve. But mercenaries are not defined solely by their combat skills. Every character in the crew can choose a secondary occupation that helps the camp in some way. An angler, for example, can catch fish from points set up all over the map, increasing the food supply for free. The cook, on the other hand, can turn the fish he catches into more nutritious meals, further increasing the food supply. Blacksmiths can craft new weapons and armor for soldiers, while thieves can steal goods from under the noses of merchants or unlock chests in ruins to obtain loot.

This combination of combat class and character occupation gives mercenaries a more specific personality. My archer, named Redrick, was an absolute liability on the battlefield. Not only did he rarely took part in battle, but when he did get his hands dirty, his arrows often hit his comrades rather than the enemy. On the other hand, he was also the camp's chief tinker, responsible for making all the basic things needed to keep the camp running. As such, it was worth putting up with the occasional arrow in the buttocks.

As both the camp and the mercenaries grew, new opportunities opened up. Wild animals could be captured, tamed, and fought alongside them, each with its own skill tree. On the battlefield, enemies can be defeated or shackled, and rewards can be exchanged at the nearest prison. Elaborate tombs are hidden throughout the world, and torches can be used to pierce the darkness to find hidden treasures and strange artifacts. And while there is no central storyline, each region has an optional storyline that will ultimately shape the future of the people who live there.

I have spent much of this review explaining how "Wartales" works. But the mechanics are for a good reason: Shiro Games has created a rich and finely detailed mechanical toy box. Every action you perform moves the needle slightly, resulting in a reaction or reward that gives you an idea of what to do next. The story is not as generative as Dwarf Fortresses or RimWorlds, but because of the way the rules work, it's easy for the imagination to fill in the narrative gaps. As mercenaries roam their camps, they are occasionally driven by introspection and make little narrative choices. In one instance, Redrick decided to be more sociable with the other mercenaries. Through his efforts, he made one friend in the camp. Unfortunately, it was a pony.

There are gaps in the worn-out chainmail of the Warthalles. Due to the structure of the game, especially in the early stages, it is necessary to turn back many times. There is a frequent need to return to the village to sign contracts, buy food and equipment, and sell items to reduce the inventory. It can also get stuck in a loop where you can only make enough money to cover basic living expenses, making it difficult to travel far into new areas I wouldn't call "Wartales" a boring game, but it can be slow-moving and frustrating at times.

More broadly, the world itself is not particularly unique compared to, say, "Divinity". Exploring some of the regions is transparent to how they are formatted, which makes them less appealing. And while the quests and dialogue are reasonably well-written, it is a struggle to say the names of characters you interact with outside of your own party.

Nevertheless, the mercenaries you've joined, trained, eaten with, slept with, explored with, and fought with will forever be burned into your brain, and while "Wartales" may not be the flashiest or most accessible game around, with perseverance, any game can offer you the most valuable currency of all: memories.