After a decade since its release i finally finished this. Funny it took me so long as i was following and participating in Jay's blog and forum for a time before the game was released - but once it did i had no income at all to buy it and then after i took a job i had no time :-P and then forgot it and drifted a bit away (he closed the forums around that time too i think). I got it on Desura at some point but aside from playing around with the initial area i didn't play much. Around 2014 or so Desura closed down but fortunately i kept all the downloads anyway.
A couple of days ago i set up Linux on a 2013 laptop i have because the laptop has a mechanical HDD and Win10 became way too unbearable with it - the thing stuttered due to disk i/o even during the login crossfade animation (and that is on an almost fresh install). Sadly it is one of those that used Nvidia's Optimus tech with a hybrid Intel iGPU and Nvidia dGPU but that was never supported properly on Linux (and Nvidia stopped supporting the 660M the laptop has years ago anyway), so i was hesitant but i decided that i don't use the laptop for heavy gaming (or much gaming at all) anyway and the Intel HD 4000 is actually properly supported by the Linux drivers (even has Vulkan 1.2 support, though supposedly a bit partial - but i haven't seen any issues in practice) so i went with it anyway. I also installed Wine to try out and see how the state of things are and one of the games i decided to check out as i was going through game setup apps in my external HDD was Frayed Knights. The game worked fine (as expected, it isn't really that heavy) but i ended up getting hooked at it and installed it on my main PC after transferring the save game there to play it properly.
Took me around 23 hours to finish it, basically i was playing the game non-stop for two days :-P. I think the first couple of areas might be the weakest parts of the game, though it quickly picks up later. I liked having to explore the maps for things like the levers, etc - though i think it was a bit easy there and could do with a little more puzzle-y approaches (also i think more than half of those i found the "solution" before the "problem" just because i was exploring the maps instead of going to the often straightforward place :-P). Also the search functionality was neat and i liked how in a few cases there was some scripted description for successfully searching somewhere you wouldn't expect (ie. it was about finding hidden loot - in one case i "searched" and found a ceiling monster and in another i avoided an ambush, which came with some funny description).
The combat is good, though i think there are a bit too many similar spells that i do not see why they exist as there seems to be some overlap between the spell effects, especially when taking spell upgrades into considertion - i'd prefer lesser spells with more unique/explicit effects and the upgrade system would handle the part of getting stronger spells anyway. But it might be my character builds - i just had everyone focus on their default archetype and i really noticed that overlap with Ben and healing where i got both stronger healing spells but also spell upgrades and often couldn't see much of a difference between the stronger spell and the weaker spell after the upgrade. Also, on the topic of magic, i can't say i liked having to use spell stones for many of the spells - or actually, it isn't the spellstones themselves (they're fine) that i had an issue with but how you (don't) obtain them. The issue is that i couldn't find a way to get those aside from the rare drop form some types of enemies, which means i ended up not using many of the spells until near the end of the game when i had hoarded a bunch of them, so i ended up not using several spells. I think if there was a more "certain" way to obtain those (like, e.g., buy them from that sorcerer that has you obtain the rare ingredients, or let you somehow make them yourself - the first merchant you meet has a handful of them but he doesn't restock... if fact the only thing he seems to restock is health potions which are very quickly outclassed by spells) i'd try to experiment more. On a similar note is the lockpicking - i didn't had any particular issue with it actually, except that i'm not sure exactly how it really works, mainly because i didn't feel a need to learn that. From all the drops i ended up collecting a ton of lockpicking materials and just used things almost randomly - with Dirk's high base reflexes and luck, reflex boost perk and reflex boost accessory pretty much everything worked. But perhaps this is how it was supposed to work :-P
Note that despite the issues i had, i still found the combat on the easy side - most of my deaths were from encountering a large group of enemies after opening some door or entering somewhere while i forgot to cast speed and damage buff spells to my fighters. One exception is fighting Hobgoblin Officers where four of them would spam AoE grenades and basically kill everyone in a few rounds. I eventually responded by spamming my own grenades until they are at half health and then take them down normally, at least until i leveled up and got better equipment (and spells) to counteract them. Also "farmed" some drama stars in the first map as by that point the enemies there were almost instakilled by my attacks but they still gave me a drama star fragment which i could use later to give back endurance to my healer during the Hobgoblin attacks. In general i think Hobgoblins have the most intelligent (or at least aggressive) behavior of all enemies in the game, bosses and supposedly big fat heavy monsters included.
Writing-wise i liked the humor - as someone mentioned in previous pages at some point it isn't really "funny" as much as "silly" but it doesn't rely (only) on that silliness and instead does have some worldbuilding and internal logic. It isn't anything groundbreaking but IMO it works fine. AFAIK the second game, if it ever comes out, is supposed to focus more on that and tone down the attempts at humor (something which apparently didn't hit with everyone). Though personally i liked the humor for the most part.
One thing i really disliked however was the UI - i enjoyed the game (as mentioned i practically did nothing aside from playing Frayed Knights the last couple of days) but that was despite the UI. The frame around the view is neat stylistically but it covers the viewport - games that had a toggleable frame, like System Shock, would readjust the render viewport's center and FOV but Frayed Knights doesn't do that, it just renders the frame as an overlay image. If you disable the frame the text becomes very hard to read in darker environments - i remember pointing these out to Jay back in the day (and suggesting the use of a shadow or outline for the text so that it is visible) but those weren't fixed (i think it was due to Torque engine issues?). Also on the topic of text, font rendering is weird - some text (like dialogs) is resolution independent but other text (like status window, spells, your journal, etc) is not and at 1920x1440 (i had to use 4:3 because IMO the UI was too spread out for 16:9) the text appears too small. I tried to use 960x720 so that i can use nearest integer filtering to get a 200% crisp scaling but didn't work as the engine filtered out anything lower than 1024x768 - i did kinda managed to work around it by toggling windowed mode which for some reason used lower resolutions but the resolution seemed to be random and instead of 960x720 i got 640x480 or 800x600 or stuff like that which were too low for the UI elements (the medallion at the bottom right covered almost half the screen). I ended up sticking with 1920x1440, just turning around the camera whenever i wanted to read the status log and... sticking my face right next to the monitor to read any text in the journal. Aside from text i also found the UX design itself a bit cumbersome, especially when it came to casting spells - like the arbitrary limit to 3 quick shots (again i have a feeling this was an engine-imposed limitation due to TGE's GUI system which AFAIK had you design GUIs by hand and was quite limited, most likely also why the spells are shown on buttons). There is too much clicking involved there. Also considering how often you need to search for stuff (i mean using the X key), it is a bit annoying to have a "nope, found nothing" dialog that you need to close pop up every time you search - i'd expect the search result to appear in the status log at the bottom left instead and the dialog to only appear when you find something.
Anyway, issues aside, i hope there will eventually be a second game as i had fun with it. I find it interesting that Jay's first game with his custom engine was made in about a year, then he switched to Torque Game Engine because he didn't want to waste time making/debugging/fixing custom engines and Frayed Knights took him a little more than four years and then he switched to Unity because TGE was rickety and buggy and Frayed Knights 2 is already a decade into making... so perhaps he should go back into using his own engine? :-P (J/K, AFAIK from a comment he made a couple of years ago on the blog the main issue seems to be around art assets and not programming)
It did put me in a free-roaming blobber mood TBH. Perhaps i'll resume my Wizards & Warriors playthrough (which BTW was what the dungeons in Frayed Knights kinda reminds me of a bit... or at least i think between M&M6 -which is with what FK is often compared to- and W&W, it is closer to the latter - though perhaps in reality it is closer to W8 which has actual turn-based combat but i haven't played that).
