Kegan Review

A revenge story with thin foundations

Kegan casts the player as a dual-blade warrior seeking vengeance after his village is destroyed and his father -- once king of Valengard -- is killed, sending him after a mysterious artifact called the Heart of Eternity and the cult trying to unleash its power. Developed and published by TDOG STUDIOS, it released on Steam on 20 October 2025 at a budget NZ$4.49, promising "a richly detailed medieval world filled with danger, political intrigue, and ancient magic" alongside "fast-paced, visceral combat" built around its protagonist's signature dual-blade technique.

Kegan's Steam review count is small -- seven total -- and worth being upfront about the quality of that sample before drawing conclusions from it: two of the four positive votes are content-free copypasta reviews (one an ASCII art meme unrelated to the game, another a wall of Unicode block characters), and a third positive review consists of a single line, "Good Game!," with no elaboration. That leaves a genuinely small pool of substantive commentary to draw on, and this review treats that thinness as a real limitation throughout rather than glossing over it.

Within that thin pool, though, the two most detailed reviews -- one in English, one in Russian, written independently -- both describe a game considerably rougher than its store-page pitch. The English-language review, rating the game across several specific categories, describes character models as unpolished: lips that don't move during dialogue, and body animations the reviewer says shift in "weird movements while talking" regardless of whether the character is a king or a commoner, with a specific complaint that the game's own king "is dressed more like a bard than a king" and lacks any visual bearing befitting the role. The same review flags subtitles during the intro as poorly translated or carelessly written, with missing and incorrect words, while crediting the game for at least including subtitles during cutscenes at all, even if the text renders too small to read comfortably with no resize option found.

The Russian-language review takes a different angle, situating Kegan against two much larger, better-resourced games -- Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic -- and finding the comparison unflattering. The reviewer describes a half-empty world padded out with a large number of invisible walls, a story that feels invented as it goes rather than planned, and specifically calls out AI-generated artwork on the game's loading screens as a symptom of the same corner-cutting. That's a reviewer-sourced observation about the game's own asset pipeline that this review reports factually rather than independently confirms, but it's a specific, checkable claim rather than vague criticism, and it fits the same overall picture the English-language review paints from a completely different angle: a game that reads better on its store page than it plays.

Steam's own achievement data offers a genuinely stark independent data point that corroborates rather than contradicts this picture. Of only three tracked achievements, the easiest -- defeating the first boss -- has been earned by just 15.8% of tracked players, and the two further milestones, "DragonSlayer" and simply "End," both sit at exactly 0%. That's an unusually severe drop-off even accounting for a small overall player base, and it's difficult to read as anything other than a strong signal that very few players who picked the game up made meaningful progress through it, let alone finished it.

It's worth being fair about what isn't damning here. A Turkish-language review, brief but genuine, calls it simply "a good game, worth it," and the detailed English review, for all its specific criticism, doesn't describe the core dual-blade combat itself as broken -- its complaints are concentrated on presentation, animation, and writing rather than the moment-to-moment feel of fighting. It's entirely possible a player less bothered by rough character animation and a thin story could still find some enjoyment in the combat loop at this price. But this review can't respond to that possibility with real confidence given how little corroborating detail exists to weigh it against the more detailed negative accounts.

Zero Steam news posts since launch round out a picture consistent with the other data gathered here: no visible sign the developer has addressed the subtitle translation issues, animation complaints, or any other specific problem raised in the available reviews. For a budget release from a small studio, that's not necessarily unusual on its own, but combined with the achievement funnel's steep drop-off and the convergent, independent criticism from two differently-focused detailed reviews, it adds up to a picture this review can't responsibly frame more generously than the evidence supports.

Set against the wider field of budget dark-fantasy action RPGs this site has covered, Kegan's central problem isn't ambition -- a revenge-driven dual-blade warrior story with political intrigue and ancient magic is a perfectly reasonable premise at this price point, and games with far rougher production values have earned real affection from players willing to meet them halfway. What distinguishes the stronger budget entries in this genre is usually a tight, well-executed core loop that papers over presentation shortfalls, or specific, vocal fan enthusiasm even from a small audience. Kegan's evidence base doesn't show either of those things clearly: the closest it comes is a handful of one-line positive votes without detail to back them up, set against two independently detailed critiques and an achievement funnel suggesting most buyers didn't get far.

Verdict

Kegan's dark-fantasy revenge premise is reasonable, and its dual-blade combat may have real merit that this review's thin evidence base can't fully confirm or deny. But the two most detailed reviews available -- describing stiff animation, an ill-fitting story, a half-empty world, and AI-generated loading art -- are corroborated rather than contradicted by an unusually weak achievement completion funnel and total silence from the developer since launch. At NZ$4.49 the financial risk is small, but the available evidence gives little reason for real confidence in what's on offer.