Our Adventurer Guild

Introduction

Our Adventurer Guild opens with your friend, the former Guild Master of a declining adventurer guild, dying and naming you successor. From there it's a straightforward pitch, executed with a depth Steam's review corpus keeps insisting is far beyond what the game's presentation suggests: manage a guild, recruit and train adventurers across a range of classes, send them on quests, and lead them through grid-based turn-based tactical combat against dozens of enemy types, all while keeping an eye on their mood and relationships with each other. It shipped as a full 1.0 release on 12 April 2024, built and published solo by a developer credited only as GreenGuy, and has since accumulated 1,776 English-language Steam reviews at a 96% positive rate — Overwhelmingly Positive, one of the strongest aggregate scores this library has covered.

The part everyone loves

Read enough of the positive reviews and the same reference points recur constantly: Final Fantasy Tactics, Fire Emblem, Darkest Dungeon, XCOM. "This gave me that feeling again," one reviewer with 118 hours logged wrote, describing the game as recapturing what Final Fantasy Tactics felt like the first time. Another, with 595 hours invested, called it "probably the best turn based game I have played ever," putting it above XCOM 2 and Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance on their own list. The combat is grid-based and tactical, with a Bravery system letting adventurers push past normal limits under pressure, and a permadeath option (Ironman mode) that several long-session reviewers specifically praise for making fights feel like they matter.

The guild-management layer is what reviewers consistently say elevates it past a straight tactics game. You're not just fielding a party — you're running an operation: recruiting adventurers with their own traits and personalities, training them into a wide range of classes with their own skill trees, tracking mood and inter-character relationships, and crafting equipment from materials adventurers bring back from quests. One reviewer with 767 hours logged called it "a nice change of pace from the Darkest Dungeon/Battle Brothers style games when you want to relax a little," while still crediting real depth underneath the more laid-back framing.

Solo-developer responsiveness comes up unprompted, repeatedly, as a selling point in its own right. One reviewer describes asking the developer directly whether a no-permadeath option could be added — and having it implemented within two days. Another, reviewing during the Early Access period, credits "constant hotfixes" for keeping the experience smooth as new systems were added. For a one-person project, that level of visible, fast iteration is unusual enough that multiple reviewers mention it as a reason to trust the purchase.

The part everyone agrees is bad

Here's the unusual thing about this review corpus: the single most common sentence pattern across the overwhelmingly positive reviews is some version of "don't let the graphics fool you." The character portraits, battle sprites and UI art are widely and specifically compared to browser Flash games from the early-to-mid 2000s — Newgrounds is invoked by name more than once, unprompted, by reviewers who otherwise rate the game a 9 or 10. "Despite looking like a game from Newgrounds, this is probably one of the closest games in feel to Final Fantasy Tactics," one wrote. Another, more bluntly: "The visuals... anywhere between 1/10 - 4/10." This isn't a minority complaint buried in the negative sample — it's the near-universal caveat attached to praise, which is why it earns its own low category score here despite the game's overall reception.

Among the 79 negative reviews (4% of the total, all read for this piece), the art style is often what stops players before the systems get a chance to win them over. "The graphics are flat, the UI is ugly and missing basic QoL features," one wrote, adding that it's "clearly made by someone who enjoys Tabletop RPGs and SRPGs" even while declining to recommend it on that basis alone.

The gameplay-level complaints

Past the visuals, the negative-review cluster raises three recurring, more substantive issues. First, several reviewers report attacks missing at unexpectedly high listed hit chances — one describes three consecutive 88-95% attacks all missing while an enemy under 30% lands every hit, calling it enough to "make you rage quit." Whether that's genuine bad luck compounding across a small sample or a real skew in the underlying math isn't something a review corpus can settle, but enough reviewers report the same pattern that it's worth flagging as a live complaint rather than dismissing it as isolated frustration.

Second, boss encounters at higher difficulty draw specific criticism for enemy-count design rather than mechanical depth — "every boss fight is 14 units verse my 5," one reviewer wrote, describing the solution as attrition rather than tactics. A few reviewers who otherwise enjoyed the game single out particular named bosses as unfairly tuned.

Third, the interface itself is a recurring friction point independent of its dated art style: critical information buried in tooltips rather than a proper stat screen, more clicking required per action than reviewers feel is necessary, and a mood/relationship system more than one reviewer calls confusing enough to accidentally tank a good run. "Feels like I have to do a lot of clicking when faster way to do things could be achieved with a better UI," one wrote.

How far players actually get

Steam's own achievement data gives an honest read on how the campaign holds attention over its full length. The tutorial-completion achievement sits at 80.9%, and the game's midgame recruitment and early-boss achievements cluster in the 30-50% range — both healthy figures for a genre with real time investment per run. The rate falls further toward the endgame: the final-boss-defeat achievement sits at 15.5%, and the rarest hidden achievements sit in the single digits. That's not an unusual curve for a long tactics RPG with permadeath and optional Ironman stakes, and it lines up with what the reviews themselves say — a large, engaged core that plays for the entire campaign sitting alongside players who bounce off in the first few hours, mostly over presentation rather than the systems underneath it.

Verdict

Our Adventurer Guild is a genuinely deep, well-regarded tactics RPG built and actively supported by one developer, wearing presentation that its own fanbase openly calls a liability. The reviews converge cleanly: if grid-based tactical combat and guild management in the vein of Final Fantasy Tactics or Darkest Dungeon appeals to you, the near-unanimous advice is to push through the first impression the art style gives and let the systems do the convincing. At NZ$21.99 for a campaign reviewers routinely spend hundreds of hours in, that's an easy recommendation with one honest caveat attached.