Serania – Path of the Scion is a fast-paced, choice-based roleplaying text adventure, set in a Nordic style medieval fantasy world where your quest is to uncover the mystery of your ancestry. In doing so, you must escape the king’s feared Blackblades, find friends and fight foes, discover forgotten places, work undercover in the town, go on side-missions and gradually solve the puzzle of your life.
Designed specifically for mobile, Serania – Path of the Scion organizes the gameplay in such a way that you don’t have to read long pages of text. Instead there is a fast-paced, progressive flow of tense, dramatic storytelling that shines with emotional intelligence and depth, combined with a multi-level choice system that gives players a lot of freedom of choice.
The interface is extremely intuitive, with a masterfully designed inventory management system and navigation dynamic that allows you to explore your environment fully and at your own pace. The reading experience is enhanced by evocative artwork that is a combination of alluring graphical images of earth-tone scenes and old-school sketches of weapons and items that find their way into your hands.
The combat system in Serania – Path of the Scion is provides some pleasing choices and lavish description when in the heat of battle, with a subtle number-crunching mechanic that creates a sense of immersion and has you hurriedly reading the text to see whether your character hit or missed their attack.
Sound and music are also top notch, though there are long periods of silence where some background sounds or gentle melodies might have been welcome. There are also a handful of typos in the text that, though unfortunate, do little to detract from a stunningly well-written and enthralling text adventure.
Created by Peter Ravnholt, the first 25 percent of Serania – Path of the Scion is free and available now on Google Play and iOS Appstore as an enhanced international version, though it is £3.99 to access the whole adventure.