Truth is what we’re best known for and I’d like to start this off with an honest one: Testament: The Order of High Human is expected to be perfect and is not. It is a beautiful, gorgeous game with deep lore and very fun puzzles with some decent combat. It has an old school scrappy developer vibe to it that makes a lot of old games endearing with graphics that appeal to the modern eyes.
We don’t use numerical rankings because it’s sitting on 6/10 on Steam right now and is at “All Reviews: Mixed” on a sample size of roughly ~20. I don’t think games that have the artistic depth that Testament does deserve to be put on a numerical scale where anything below 8 is a waste of your money. There’s an audience out there for Testament who love this style of game and when it comes to what that style is, it does it exceedingly well.
An Esoteric Blockbuster
Testament: TOHH or let’s just go with Testament is an old-school style RPG do it all game with really deep lore and great graphics. The issue is that this genre of game is always, always historically scrappy and ambitious but doesn’t deliver equally on everything. Much like Gordon Ramsay waltzing into a restaurant with too much on the menu, games like Testament offer much more than they can deliver with their team of 15 people and six years.
Yet, that’s… the game? That’s the genre! That’s what the game is entirely focused on and even intentional in how it approaches things. It’s a throwback to the days of Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven when the ambitiousness of the game meant more than the perfection of each and every mechanic. The large scope and vast wealth of different content to do was what made M&M VI such a strong game and reviewed so well across the board.
Testament has a lot of combat, platforming with puzzles, hard puzzles and hard combat. The combat isn’t designed to be easy or intuitive, it’s designed to make you work around the combat system itself to accomplish the goal. A specific feature of the old school type of game that it aims to emulate.
Testament’s Graphics, Lore and Gameplay
The game is very pretty. The lore is actually quite deep and the developers poured a lot of love into the story. The gameplay contains a lot and excels when it’s doing something unique. The light puzzles are really cool and a lot of fun. Combat is a system of trial and error and quite frustrating, but it feels like a design choice more so than anything else – some things are unbalanced, some are balanced and I kind of dig that vibe.
There’s a ton of depth and the wheel is kind of cool and has a throwback retro angle to it.
Testament’s Sound and Voice Acting
Actually, really neat. The dragon in the game is probably my favorite voice actor, but the soundscape, sound score and the voice acting are all on par for the game. The microphone quality of the audio capture is quite nice (there’s no cheap mic noises) and the voice actors are passionate about their delivery.
Some spell effects get annoying when there’s a ton of them on the screen, but that’s kind of charming.
Conclusion
For a game made by such a small team and with so many cool features, in a neat setting I’d say definitely give this game a try if you’re into first person RPGs that have a lot of fiddling around to do and a lot of exploration. If you want a buttoned up, perfect first-person RPG, look to Bethesda.
However, if you want a unique story and something completely different, Testament is definitely worth a look. You’ve got a 10+ hour adventure with jumping over lava, fighting massive golems,
This review was done pursuant to our review policy. We were provided a key for the game, but have had no direct communication with the developer as of publication of the review.
