Review: Necro Story isn’t perfect, but it’s certainly fun enough to raise your spirits

With Halloween around the corner, it’s a great time to try out all the spooky games. Necro Story is a fairly good game to add to your line-up if you like turn-based combat. Otherwise, this one might be a skip for you.

There are a few difficulty settings, including a Story Mode that promises more story than fighting. However, when I tried out the mode, I didn’t really see a difference between it and easy mode. You might be a smidge faster and stronger, but you still get put into battles quite often. In fact, it’s almost a little more annoying since the battling is – as the game says – just a formality.

Necro Story: The “Speerz” monster looks like what?

Necro Story is a story about a world that has been eradicated of humans. In their absence, the rise of monsters took root in various forms from the obscure (and questionable)monster “Speerz” to something as common as an owl.

The story opens with you, a necromancer, lying on a slab with the assumption that you’re dead when, in fact, you’re in a coma. The dialogue mentions that about five years have passed, so it’s unclear how you’ve managed to stay alive in a vegetative state for so long, but we’re gonna go with magic.

Some mushroom monsters cruise up on our resting place and boom – our story begins.

I won’t go into the specifics because I don’t really know how to go into the details without spoiling some lore and making things more confusing. So, let’s just say that you manage to get out of the scuffle with the mushrooms and a ghost named Vivi finds you.

She’s basically your guide in this world and tells you what you need to do while having the added bonus of being a party member. As a necromancer, she wants you to revive all of the dead humans. She’s super vague about the details.

You don’t really have a choice except to trust her, but let’s just say despite being incorporeal, homegirl is not transparent with the details.

What happens next is all very RPG standard. You walk through the castle to find the exit, you encounter monsters that you fight in a turn-based style, and when you find the exit you walk around a giant map.

If you played RPGs from the 80s/90s, this will all feel very familiar to you. While walking around the map, you’re going to encounter more monsters, but, thankfully, these aren’t hidden. Unfortunately, being able to see where the monsters are doesn’t exactly make them easier to avoid. 

You are not sneaky and they will see you…

In the tutorial phase, you’re told that you can’t bypass every monster encounter, but you can get away from some of them. This is very rarely the case. Even playing on easy, I wasn’t able to get around monster encounters. They appear as a fog that moves in a set path, but when you get too close, they will give chase and they are faster than you.

There are a few elements in Necro Story that go into leveling and upgrading your characters. First of all, as a necromancer, you have access to the souls of deceased monsters. You have to manually collect those by clicking on them or they fly away. Each collected soul will go toward a soul mirror, of sorts.

The soul mirror is made up of about 5-7 souls and appears in the top right corner. Once it’s fully loaded, you can then drag a soul of your choosing to spawn a mob of that creature that will join your party.

So, in some ways, it’s a monster-collecting game as well.

Your monsters will level up from the experience you get from winning battles. You can’t really mess with their stats, but you can upgrade your own. You can put points into more health, better magic renewal, harder physical hits, and more magic damage.

As you level, you’ll gain more spells so you can tailor the strategy that best fits your playstyle. Each spell has a tree attached to it where you can upgrade how well they work.

On top of that, you will find treasure dotted around that you can equip to your monsters, but not yourself. Staves are the only thing that your character can use, so you won’t be able to wear any of the bracelets or necklaces that you find. But, you can pop them onto your monsters for an added bonus. 

Each monster, including Vivi, has two slots to put things into. You’ll want to be mindful of what you’re using and where, however, because I couldn’t find where you could take them off. So, it’s likely that you’ll end up cycling to new monsters as you tame them and losing access to some of the gear when you take the geared-up monster off your rotation. 

Bedazzle your monsters one found treasure at a time!

And that’s pretty much the game. You’ll get more lore as you go and find Vivi to be more and more sus due to the things she doesn’t say. But, overall, she’s meant to be your guide and the comic relief.

The only thing left to talk about is the optics. Visually, I really enjoyed the soft chalk-pastel vibe of the art style. The music isn’t bad, but it loops pretty early, so you kind of get tired of it. And, lastly, I mentioned in the cons that an offensive term was used.

During your first boss battle, the boss monster calls your company a slur. We’ve actually reached out to the PR team handling the game and they’ve assured us that it’s going to get patched. All versions should be patched before the final release, but the console versions may take just a bit longer for the patch to be implemented.

We didn’t assume malice was used when using this term, but rather a language barrier was put in place. Thankfully, we got confirmation that the dev is French and it was just a case of not knowing what you don’t know when it was translated into English. All versions should be updated to omit that term before or just after release.

If you’d like to give Necro Story a try, you can grab it on Steam starting October 7th, 2024, for $14.99 or on PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, or Xbox for the same price. The listing for the PlayStation doesn’t appear to be active yet at the time of posting, so it wasn’t linked. Otherwise, you’re welcome to check out the review we did of Grunn.