Pale Coins Review

A solo-built Gothic descendant with real rough edges

Pale Coins is an old-school fantasy action RPG from solo developer Lukas Irzl, set in the unforgiving land of Grenmark and built around exploration, dungeon-delving, and boss encounters that draw heavily on Gothic-style world design with soulslike combat leanings. Following two full years of public demo development that began in October 2023, with steady monthly community updates and a visibly engaged developer presence on Discord throughout, the game released on 22 October 2025 at a notably low NZ$14.75. Its review sample, a substantial 304 reviews at the time of writing, sits at Very Positive -- a score built on genuine, repeated enthusiasm for what the game gets right, tempered by real and specific frustrations with how combat actually feels to play.

The praise across the sample is remarkably consistent in both tone and comparison points. Reviewer after reviewer independently reaches for the same touchstones -- Gothic, Drova, and classic top-down Zelda -- to describe what Pale Coins is doing, and just as consistently concludes the game earns those comparisons rather than merely imitating them. One reviewer calls it simply "one of my favorite RPGs of the last couple of years," having bought it expecting only "2 or 3 hours of entertainment" on the strength of its pixel art alone. Another describes discovering the game a week before release, having already logged 35 hours in its demo, and calls the in-game character customization "extremely large," specifically praising the freedom to build a spellcaster wielding a giant two-handed sword rather than being locked into rigid class archetypes. A third reviewer frames it plainly as "Witcher 3 if it was combined with Zelda LTTP," while another calls it "reminds me of Zelda on NES, but with way more layers, and variety," insisting it's "totally worth" the asking price and urging others to "support these devs so they can make more good stuff" -- a sentiment that recurs across a striking number of reviews regardless of how many hours the reviewer had logged.

That enthusiasm consistently softens, though, once reviewers describe the actual feel of combat. The most specific and widely repeated complaint concerns dodging: multiple reviewers independently report that the dodge mechanic is tied to certain weapon abilities rather than functioning as a basic movement option, and that it aims toward the mouse cursor rather than the direction the character is moving -- a combination one reviewer summarises simply as "awkward." That control friction compounds, for some reviewers, into a broader complaint about pacing: several describe combat as "tedious and boring," with one writing they "really tried to like this game" and found a lot to appreciate, but ultimately couldn't get past how slow individual encounters felt to resolve. Notably, this isn't a universal reaction -- many of the same reviewers praising the game's exploration and loot describe combat as merely "fun" or "surprisingly fun" rather than a weak point, suggesting the friction lands harder for players expecting tighter, faster action-RPG combat than the game is built to deliver.

Beyond combat feel, the sample surfaces a specific and concerning cluster of technical complaints for a launch-week release. One reviewer reports the game repeatedly minimising itself to a small window every couple of minutes, ultimately forcing a refund despite otherwise liking what they saw. Another describes severe input lag and frame-pacing problems making early dungeon areas "painful to play," while a third reports the most serious issue in the sample: losing an entire 16-hour save. These reports sit alongside a much larger volume of reviewers reporting no such problems, suggesting inconsistent performance across specific hardware or save configurations rather than a universal failure -- but they're serious enough, and specific enough, to flag clearly for anyone considering an early purchase.

A final, more structural thread of criticism concerns the game's difficulty and progression philosophy. More than one reviewer argues the single-playthrough experience feels comparatively thin because the game is fundamentally designed around New Game Plus-style repeat runs, with one writing bluntly that games built this way have "one big problem" -- deprioritising a satisfying first playthrough in favour of a system "designed with the intention of you replaying it to have fun." Related complaints about early-game backtracking, a lack of fast travel in the opening hours, and a stat-gating system that caught at least one player off guard when trying to invest in lockpicking as a mage round out a picture of a game whose systems reward patience and experimentation, but which doesn't always clearly telegraph its own rules up front.

Value framing threads through nearly the entire sample, regardless of how individual reviewers feel about combat feel or launch bugs. At NZ$14.75, reviewers repeatedly note the price is unusually generous relative to the amount of world, loot, and replayable content on offer -- one reviewer with over 70 hours logged specifically frames the price as an incentive to buy in and support a clearly ongoing, actively developed solo project rather than treating the game as a finished, static purchase. That framing matters given the developer's visible post-launch responsiveness: reviewers repeatedly reference an active Discord presence and note the developer directly soliciting feedback and iterating on complaints, with at least one reviewer explicitly updating their own review to note "it's getting better with patches and additions" even while maintaining reservations about specific systems. For a solo-developed game shipping with the rough edges this one has, that ongoing engagement is a meaningful part of the overall picture reviewers are weighing.

Verdict

Pale Coins is a genuinely impressive solo effort that earns its Very Positive rating through absorbing exploration, real character-building freedom, and atmosphere that consistently draws Gothic and Drova comparisons its review sample says are well deserved. But clunky, weapon-tied dodge controls, tedious combat pacing for a meaningful share of players, and real launch-week technical issues -- including at least one lost save -- keep this from being an unreserved recommendation. At its low asking price, though, and with a developer visibly still patching and engaging with feedback, this is a hidden gem worth taking a chance on for RPG fans who value world and systems over combat polish.