Chronicon

Two people made this. That fact does a lot of quiet work in how you should read the rest of this review, because Chronicon spends its entire runtime asking to be judged the way you'd judge Grim Dawn or Last Epoch — by the size of its skill trees, the layers in its itemisation, the number of builds it can support — and for a studio that was one person for most of its development, it comes remarkably close to earning that comparison. It also comes with the rough edges you'd expect from a budget indie ARPG that never had the headcount to smooth them out, and the two things sit next to each other on almost every page of this review without ever fully resolving.

Subworld is Daniel Stigsjöö, working alone out of Gothenburg from 2015, joined by co-founder Marika Assgård in 2021. Chronicon spent roughly five years in Early Access before graduating to a full 1.0 release on 21 August 2020, and the studio kept adding to it for another two and a half years before calling March 2023's patch "the final planned update" for the base game. What's left behind is a complete, self-contained ARPG for NZ$20.49, with two small paid expansions on top and zero monetisation beyond that — no shop, no currency, no season pass, nothing selling you a shortcut. In a genre where "free-to-play" increasingly means gacha pets and taxed trade houses, that alone is worth noting before getting into whether the game underneath is any good.

Five classes, and the trees that actually differ

The base roster is Templar, Warden, Warlock and Berserker, each built around its own weapon identity and a skill tree deep enough to support several genuinely different builds inside a single class — a Warlock leaning into curses and minion summons plays nothing like one built around direct elemental nukes, despite sharing a starting point. The Mechanist expansion adds a fifth class built around a gun, a throwable axe and a jetpack, with its own satellite-and-drone subsystem layered on top, and it's a good example of what Subworld does well with expansion content: it's a fully distinct playstyle, not a reskin of an existing tree with new icons.

Where the class design gets criticised, and fairly, is at the margins — several long-time players have pointed out that some skill nodes across different classes amount to the same fireball or ice bolt with a different colour palette, and that a handful of talent branches read as filler between the genuinely distinctive choices. That's a real limitation next to Last Epoch, where every single skill gets a bespoke specialization tree with its own transformations rather than drawing from a shared modifier pool. Chronicon's trees are wide enough to support real variety; they're not uniformly deep enough that every branch feels designed rather than populated.

Runes, sockets, artifacts: the itemisation stack

Skills are only the first layer. Gear carries sockets for runes that modify specific abilities, set items rewrite entire kits when you complete them, and Ancient Beasts — the first expansion — adds a companion creature you raise from hatchling to adult, which carries its own artifact items and eventually grants up to six additional passive powers chosen from a pool of over thirty. None of that is decorative: a socket build built around a specific rune combination plays measurably differently from the same base skill without it, and stacking rune, set and artifact bonuses together is where Chronicon's theorycrafting genuinely gets interesting.

It doesn't reach Last Epoch's precision. There's no deterministic crafting bench here — no choosing the exact affix you want and watching a risk meter count down as you push for it. Item modifiers are rolled, not targeted, and the best legendary and true-legendary items with the specific rolls a build actually wants are drops you farm for, same as any less ambitious loot game. What Chronicon does instead is give you more axes to pull a build together across — skill choice, rune choice, set bonus, artifact selection — so a strong build feels assembled from several decisions rather than found in a single lucky drop. Whether that reads as "meaningful decisions" or "more dials on the same slot machine" depends a lot on how much you enjoy the assembly itself, and the split in Steam's own negative reviews on this exact point is close to even.

A campaign most players don't finish

Chronicon's five-act campaign is also where global achievement data tells a story the store page doesn't. The act-completion achievements sit at 52.6% for Act 1, dropping to 44.9% for Act 2, 40.7% for Act 3, 35.8% for Act 4 and 29.4% for Act 5 — meaning fewer than three in ten players who ever launched the game finish the story it's built around. Push further into what the game actually wants you doing at endgame and the drop-off gets steeper still: reaching character level 100 on any single class sits at just 10–15% depending on which of the five classes you check, and the DLC-specific endgame achievements for Ancient Beasts and The Mechanist mostly sit in single digits.

That curve matters because Chronicon's entire critical case — including this review's — rests on systems that only fully engage once sockets, runes and set pieces start layering on top of each other, which is a mid-game and endgame conversation. A large majority of the people who buy this game apparently never get there, which either says the opening hours don't sell the payoff well enough, or says the combat carrying you through those hours is asking more patience than it deserves. Reading the low-playtime negative reviews, it's mostly the second explanation: complaints about repetitive, low-impact combat cluster heavily under the two-hour mark, well before any of the build-crafting systems above have had a chance to matter.

Where the age shows: combat feel and the interface

The specific complaint that recurs from 2020 straight through to 2026 is that you cannot move while attacking. It's a deliberate design decision, not a bug, and Subworld has never walked it back across nine years of development — but reviewers have flagged the resulting stiffness, the lack of audible or visual hit feedback, and melee that can feel like "swinging at air" in roughly the same words for half a decade. Ranged and caster builds feel this less, since some skills grant short teleports or repositioning tools, but the base traversal-and-attack loop reads as noticeably older than anything built with a dodge roll or an active-block system in mind.

The interface has the same problem in a smaller way. Tooltips are dense, icons are small, and comparing two items means parsing a lot of tightly packed text — friction that several reviewers specifically blame for making the mid-game loot firehose feel worse than it needs to. None of this makes Chronicon unpleasant on a large monitor with good eyesight; it's a real problem on a laptop screen or from a couch with a controller, despite the controller support itself being genuinely solid.

Two small expansions, then a quiet handoff

Both paid expansions are worth their NZ$8.99 asking price on their own terms. Ancient Beasts adds the companion-and-artifact system described above along with new Expedition content and a passive skill tree that sits above your class trees; The Mechanist adds a fully distinct fifth class with its own weapon kit and over forty new items. Neither feels like a content pack stitched onto an unfinished base game — both read as Subworld finishing ideas the original release didn't have room for.

What they aren't is ongoing. March 2023's patch really was the last one for Chronicon itself, and Subworld's attention since has gone to Chronicon: Survivors, a horde-survival spin-off in the same universe released in August 2024 and still receiving updates, plus a third unannounced project the studio has said is aiming for a beta later this year. That's a reasonable way for a two-person studio to manage its time, and it means Chronicon isn't abandoned so much as complete — but anyone buying today should know they're buying a finished, static game, not one that's still growing the way Grim Dawn's Fangs of Asterkarn expansion proved that game still is.

Where it sits next to Grim Dawn and Last Epoch

Next to either of those, Chronicon is unmistakably the budget option, and it plays like one. It doesn't have Grim Dawn's dual-mastery combinatorics or its faction-driven world, and it doesn't have Last Epoch's deterministic crafting or per-skill specialization trees. What it has instead is a build sandbox that's genuinely wider than its price tag suggests, wrapped around combat and an interface that never had a AAA budget's worth of polish applied to them. For twenty dollars, that's a fair trade. For someone deciding between all three with money to spend either way, Grim Dawn and Last Epoch are both doing more with their combat feel, and Chronicon's real advantage is that it costs a fraction of committing to either.

Verdict

Chronicon earns real credit for what a two-person studio built here: five classes with distinct identities, an itemisation stack that layers skills, runes, sets and artifacts into genuine build variety, and two expansions that both add something rather than pad something out — all for less than the price of a single big-name ARPG expansion. It loses ground on combat that has felt stiff since 2020 and still does, an interface that asks too much of small screens, a recurring save-corruption bug that's never fully gone away, and an achievement curve showing most buyers never see the systems this review is praising. Seven reflects a genuinely good, occasionally excellent build sandbox that a AAA budget would have sanded the edges off of — worth the asking price for the right player, and a real risk of bouncing off for anyone the combat doesn't click with in the first couple of hours.

Pricing, review and achievement data checked 2 August 2026.

Players who'd rather their build kept growing passively, without an attack animation locking out movement, may also want to look at Wanderer.