Summary

Release Year: 2018
Genres: Adventure, Hack and slash/Beat ’em up
Platforms: PlayStation 4
Developers: LGS Games Productions
Publishers: LGS Games Productions

If you glanced at Steam’s new releases last week you could be forgiven for thinking Sword of Fortress: The Onomuzim was yet another low-budget souls-like destined for the void of page-15 obscurity. The name alone sounds like a random-word generator had a stroke. But here’s the twist: buried under the clunky title and the $40 price tag is one of the most compulsively playable action-RPGs I’ve touched this year. It’s janky, sure—think early GUST or pre-Kadokawa FromSoftware—but it’s also ambitious, weirdly charming, and shockingly player-respectful. After 30 hours, three respecs, and one spectacularly messy castle siege that crashed my game twice, I’m ready to call it: Onomuzim is the best-kept secret of 2024 so far.

A fortress that actually remembers you

The elevator pitch is “Souls combat meets Suikoden base-building.” You play a nameless exile sent to reclaim the continent-spanning fortress Onomuzim, a living citadel that rearranges its interior every time the moon bleeds (roughly every 45 minutes of real time). Early on you rescue a blacksmith, and instead of simply upgrading your weapons he sets up a forge in the central courtyard. Ten hours later that courtyard has ballooned into a thriving hamlet: merchants humming work songs, a training dummy that tracks DPS, and a potato-loving dragon who buffs drop rates if you pet him daily. Every NPC you rescue adds a new system—gardening, beast trapping, even a rudimentary stock market that fluctuates with the number of player deaths worldwide. It’s like Animal Crossing if Tom Nook moonlighted as a death-metal vocalist.

The hook is permanence. Die in a souls-like and the world resets; die in Onomuzim and your fortress keeps every plank you nailed down. Enemy captains remember your tactics and start packing fire resistance if you spam pyromancy. A gate you blew open with gunpowder stays blown open on every subsequent run, creating new shortcuts and ambush points. By hour 20 the fortress feels like a collaborative diary between you and the developers—every broken wall a reminder of an earlier embarrassment, every new tower a testament to a hard-won victory.

Combat: somewhere between Sekiro and a bar fight

Combat is real-time with stamina-based parries, but you can also pause mid-fight to issue orders to up to two AI companions. Think Dragon Age on espresso: battles are frantic, slightly floaty, but never sloppy. Weapon types genuinely feel different: twin daggers turn you into a whirling Cuisinart, while the new “anchor blade” (a sword welded to a ship’s ball-and-chain) pancakes crowds at the cost of shredding your own poise. Magic is tied to collectible “seals” that you slot into equipment; mix a frost seal with a fire seal and you get scalding steam clouds that confuse enemy AI. The theory-crafting rabbit hole is deep enough that the community wiki already has 400-edit wars over the best end-game build (consensus: bleed-crit archer with a hedgehog familiar).

Enemy variety is the real star. Past the halfway point you’ll face siege-engine mimics that unfold into bipedal tanks, or necromancers who reanimate your previously slain character as a mini-boss wearing your old gear. The first time I had to fight “Past-Me”—complete with my mismatched armor and that stupid mushroom hat—I simultaneously cheered and screamed.

Performance: rough but not ruinous

Let’s get the ugly out of the way. Onomuzim runs on an in-house engine that looks like UE4’s scrappy cousin. Textures pop in late, shadows flicker during cut-scenes, and the frame-rate dips to 48 fps in the rain-drenched ramparts. I also hit three hard locks—twice during auto-saves, once when I alt-tabbed to check Discord. That sounds dire, but the game autosaves every 90 seconds and never lost more than two minutes of progress. A day-one hotfix already shaved 30% off CPU load, and the small studio is pushing daily patches. If you refuse to play anything below 60 fps stable, wait a month. Everyone else: the stutters are annoying, not game-breaking.

Visuals: PlayStation 3.5 with art direction to spare

Technically we’re talking 720p textures upscaled to 1440p, but the art team squeezes blood from that stone. The fortress drips Byzantine detail: prayer flags strung between crenellations, moonlight refracted through stained glass, enemy banners that dynamically burn once you capture a wing. Armor sets skew toward the fantastical—one late-game chest piece is literally a haunted bookshelf strapped to your torso, paper cranes fluttering out on dodge rolls. It’s the rare game where photo mode (already included) feels like a reward rather than a marketing bullet.

Story: bonkers, but it knows it

The writing walks a tightrope between dark fantasy and self-aware camp. One quest has you poisoning a rat king; the next forces you to mediate a labor dispute between kobold janitors. The localization team clearly had fun: an early boss taunts, “I will fold you like bad origami!” and the subtitle alone got a genuine laugh. Beneath the goofiness is a surprisingly thoughtful meditation on colonialism: every territory you “liberate” becomes part of your fortress, raising questions about who exactly benefits from your conquest. The game doesn’t moralize, but it lets you make choices—burn the granaries for quick resources and you’ll fight hungrier, more desperate enemies later. The eight endings reportedly range from utopian commune to full-on tyrant simulator; I’ve seen three and am still theory-crafting how to reach the mythical “true” neutral finale.

Loot and progression: Diablo meets dark souls

Gear drops are color-coded, but rarities have fixed perks rather than random rolls, eliminating the lottery grind while still preserving that dopamine ping. More importantly, every piece of loot is craftable. Find a helmet once and you can reproduce it at your smithy provided you’ve befriended the miner who supplies star-iron. That single design decision removes the fear of selling something “maybe useful later,” which in turn encourages experimentation. I cycled through four completely different builds in one weekend without ever feeling penalized.

Leveling is Elder Scrolls-style: use greatswords, get better at greatswords. The genius bit is that skill caps are gated by story milestones, so you can’t simply grind trash mobs to 100. You have to push into new wings of the fortress, guaranteeing that players engage with fresh content rather than farming the same hallway for three hours.

Replay value: three and a half campaigns in one

Because the fortress repopulates with new enemy factions each major story beat, new-game-plus feels more like new-game-different. Route A ends around level 40; NG+ bumps the cap to 60 and introduces vampire merchants who sell previously enemy-only gear. NG++ adds “iron mode” permadeath but lets you recruit boss characters. Developer estimates put full completion—every ending, every recruitable NPC, every crafting pattern—at around 110 hours. Even at the $40 asking price that’s sub-fifty-cents per hour, a metric my accountant calls “dangerously good value for avoiding social interaction.”

Multiplayer: asynchronous with a splash of invasion

There’s no co-op, but you can send “echoes” of your character into other players’ worlds as mercenaries. If they hire you and you survive, you wake up back in your own game with a cut of their gold. Conversely, you can open your fortress to invasion: another player’s echo will spawn as a red phantom and attempt to assassinate your blacksmith. Successfully repelling invaders nets you crafting coupons; fail and you lose half your unspent souls—sorry, “essence.” It’s a clever risk-reward loop that keeps you logging in “just to check the perimeter.”

Accessibility: better than most AAAs

Color-blind modes, full remapping, adjustable QTE windows, and a “narrative” difficulty that reduces damage by 70% while keeping achievements active. The studio even added a one-handed control preset after a beta player lost use of his right arm. You don’t see that level of thought in games with ten times the budget.

Microtransactions: none, nada, zilch

No battle pass, no cosmetic shop, no “convenience” currency. Future DLC is planned as a single expansion, free to Kickstarter backers and priced “less than a large pizza” for everyone else. In 2024 that’s practically a unicorn.

Verdict: diamond in the rough, priced like rough

Sword of Fortress: The Onomuzim is the most fun I’ve had with a janky game since E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy. It crashes, it curses, it occasionally forgets how stairs work. But it also respects your time, experiments with genre in ways AAA publishers fear, and delivers a feedback loop of exploration, base-building, and gear chasing that had me muttering “just one more loop” at 3 a.m. on a work night. If you need pixel-perfect polish, wait for a sale and a few more patches. If you can stomach a little friction in exchange for boundless creativity, buy it now—because in six months the secret will be out, and you’ll wish you’d been there when the fortress first woke up.

Score: 8.5/10 – Essential for the adventurous, forgivable for the patient, and a genuine shot in the arm for anyone who thinks the modern industry has forgotten how to take risks.

Review Score

6.5/10

Sword of Fortress the Onomuzim

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Christopher

Reiner Knizia’s High Society