THE MOST FORGETTABLE RPG IN HISTOR... WHAT WAS I SAYING?
My Random Games Initiative is a small ritual I perform every now and then. I pour myself a cup of coffee, sit down at my desktop, and let the MobyGames database pick a random game from video game history for me to play. Rimelands: Hammer of Thor would have been a perfect candidate: obscure, ugly as sin, dated beyond belief and broadly unappealing. Even its own mother would avert her gaze. Only a true God of Random would inflict it on someone.
But no—I bought it myself.
I can’t remember why, but I suspect it happened during that early Switch period when I hoarded dirt-cheap games to pad out my library. What if I ran out of games during my vacation? A terrifying thought. Rimelands is an isometric, turn-based RPG, which puts it squarely in my wheelhouse. It must have been very cheap.
Thankfully, the game (from Finnish studio Crescent Moon Games) isn’t as bad as it looks. I don’t regret playing it. It took me about five hours to beat—possibly a personal low when it comes to RPG time investment. Only the original Ultima might rank lower. I also didn’t die once, which says far more about the game’s difficulty than my tactical prowess. This may well be the easiest RPG I’ve ever played.
You control a female orphan named Cristo (first name of your choosing), raised by her grandmother Morgana in a frozen, ice-age version of Scandinavia. As a child, Cristo witnessed her family’s murder at the hands of robbers wearing clothes marked with a strange symbol.
Twenty years later, grave robbers break into an ancient vault and steal a pair of Jotunn bracers bearing the same symbol. Cristo becomes obsessed, gives chase, and thus begins this pocket-sized RPG.
I’ve rarely encountered a game so aggressively unremarkable. It feels like it might consist entirely of prefab Unity assets. Someday I may vaguely remember a scene and wonder whether I played it or dreamt it. Dungeons, outdoor areas and settlements all blend together into one frozen blur, reinforced by music that’s atmospheric but utterly devoid of melody.
The visuals are mobile-friendly in the worst way: low-polygon models drained of detail. In handheld mode, they’re serviceable. Docked? Watching Rimelands on a TV is like attending a dull church sermon. Every area looks the same. The grid-based movement allows only four directions—no diagonals. Ancient, but familiar. I grew up on tiles, so I adapted quickly.
Playing the game itself isn’t dull. The story is brief and functional, and the turn-based combat is simple but competent. Combat uses dice rolls with symbols: skulls for hits, shields for blocks, Xs for misses. Roll more skulls than your opponent’s shields and you deal damage.
You can spend mana to re-roll misses or activate special abilities found in three skill trees. It’s basic, but it works—and I have a soft spot for skill trees. I built a melee-focused barbarian and never regretted it. Magic and ranged builds presumably work just as well.
Loot is plentiful, but hard to miss, because the game is extremely linear. There’s perhaps one optional area and a handful of sidequests that barely stray from the main path. Zones are narrow corridors with occasional branches for loot. A post-game area exists in the Finnish part of the map, possibly added for the Switch version. I didn’t bother.
Crafting exists too. You can find blueprints for powerful gear, but by the time you’ve dismantled enough equipment—at considerable cost—to craft them, you’ve usually already found something better. The system feels vestigial.
The story has a twist or two (I think), and the final boss briefly puzzled me by constantly healing. Once I understood the trick, he went down quickly. My character had become absurdly powerful, without any grinding. With no respawning enemies, overpoweredness simply happens.
Rimelands is like a firework: you light it, watch it fizzle, and forget why you bothered. The Norse gods feature somehow—presumably—but the title does most of the storytelling. Whatever emotional investment the narrative might have earned is smothered by the visuals and distant camera. Dialogue is static, characters lack portraits, and it took me most of the game to even form a clear image of Cristo or Morgana.
Crafting exists too. You can find blueprints for powerful gear, but by the time you’ve dismantled enough equipment—at considerable cost—to craft them, you’ve usually already found something better. The system feels vestigial.
The story has a twist or two (I think), and the final boss briefly puzzled me by constantly healing. Once I understood the trick, he went down quickly. My character had become absurdly powerful, without any grinding. With no respawning enemies, overpoweredness simply happens.
Rimelands is like a firework: you light it, watch it fizzle, and forget why you bothered. The Norse gods feature somehow—presumably—but the title itself does most of the storytelling. Whatever emotional investment the narrative might have earned is smothered by the visuals and distant camera. Dialogue is static, characters lack portraits, and it took me most of the game to get a clear visual representation of Cristo or Morgana.
And yet, I don’t regret playing it.
The simple-but-addictive loop carried me forward, almost like junk food. The skill tree stood in for story, loot replaced character development, and somehow that was enough—for five hours. It’s a hard game to recommend, but an easy one to forget.
Which, in a strange way, makes it oddly fitting for my Random Games Initiative.
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