The fate of the world is at stake, and I haven't even made it out of the starting city. The Bard's Tale IV seems long, to say the least—I'm ten hours in as I write this, and I feel like I just finished the prologue. Suffice it to say, we're not slapping a score on this one yet.

And perhaps that's a good thing, because The Bard's Tale IV ($35 on Humble) is a fascinating game that desperately needs polishing up.

A looming high-resolution shadow

Let's just deal with performance first, because it really is abysmal. Listen, I'm running a PC with an overclocked i7-5820K and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. It is absolute overkill for even the most cutting-edge games, and The Bard's Tale IV isn't one of them. Art direction is strong, but you wouldn't look at it and go "Wow, what a technical feat." Indeed, the recommended specs on the Steam page are a fairly reasonable i5-4590 and a GTX 970.

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