Tales of Old: Dominus

A revenge story with an unusually large sandbox wrapped around it

Tales of Old: Dominus, developed by the small independent team Hvmana Industries MMD and published by indie.io, launched on 3 November 2025 as a full, non-Early Access release. Its premise is straightforward, gritty medieval revenge fiction: after a failed uprising against corrupt nobles who introduced Prima Nocta rights ends in the massacre known as the Battle of the Brides, Eric of Woldham returns home to find his village burned and his sister taken. What follows is pitched as an open-world RPG combining detailed, blood-focused combat, realistic stealth affected by light and noise, survival systems covering hunger, thirst and warmth, and — eventually — building and managing villages, cities and strongholds while leading troops in a second rebellion. It's an unusually large design brief for a small team to take on, closer in stated ambition to something like Kingdom Come: Deliverance than to a typical budget indie RPG, and several reviewers reach for exactly that comparison unprompted.

The bugs the review corpus keeps circling back to

The single most consistent thread across Tales of Old: Dominus's negative reviews isn't about design choices — it's about whether the game currently functions as intended. Specific, detailed reports describe quests that don't register as complete even after their objectives are finished, leaving players stuck with no way to progress; loot disappearing from both personal inventory and placed storage chests; food spoiling within a reported five minutes of play, undermining the survival loop the game is otherwise built around; and combat encounters where enemy attack animations don't render at all, turning fights into guesswork rather than a fair test of the stealth and combat systems the store page advertises. One reviewer states plainly that they had to double-check whether they'd actually bought a finished release rather than an early alpha build — a specific, pointed comparison that recurs, in substance if not in exact wording, across several other detailed reviews.

Performance complaints compound the picture. Multiple reviewers report significant lag and stuttering across a range of hardware, including systems above the game's stated minimum specifications, alongside interface problems like keybinding options that don't reliably apply and horse-riding controls several reviewers single out as specifically frustrating to use. None of these are unusual problems for a small-team open-world release to launch with — they're the kind of issues an Early Access period exists specifically to surface and fix — but Tales of Old: Dominus shipped as a full, non-Early Access product, which raises the bar for how forgivingly that launch state should be read.

The case reviewers make in its defence

It would be a mistake to read the review corpus as uniformly negative, and a genuinely substantial share of it isn't. Several detailed positive reviews explicitly acknowledge the same bugs described above and recommend the game anyway, framing the issues as fixable polish problems layered on top of a fundamentally sound and ambitious design rather than evidence the project is broken at its core. One reviewer, identifying themselves as a solo developer working on their own game, argues directly that harsher reviews are "way out of touch" given the sheer scope Hvmana Industries MMD took on relative to its resources, and points specifically to the settlement-building, camp-capture and open-ended character progression systems as genuinely well-realised ideas that plenty of better-funded, more polished releases don't even attempt. Multiple reviewers separately single out the Unreal Engine 5 visuals as well above what the price point would typically buy, and the low NZ$22.49 asking price is cited repeatedly, across both positive and cautiously negative reviews alike, as the detail that makes taking a chance on the game's rough edges feel reasonable rather than reckless.

A team this small, taking on a scope this large

It's worth being direct about what that combination — a tiny team, a very large design brief, and a full retail launch rather than an Early Access one — actually implies for how to judge this game. Multiple reviewers describe the team behind Tales of Old: Dominus as effectively one person or a handful of people, which makes the sheer number of interlocking systems on offer — combat, stealth, survival, crafting, settlement management, troop leadership, open-ended character builds — a genuinely impressive scope to have attempted at all, and also a highly plausible explanation for why so many specific, individually minor bugs have surfaced simultaneously across so many of those systems at once. A team this size testing this many interacting mechanics against every possible player path before launch is a very different proposition from a studio with a dedicated QA department doing the same job, and the pattern of bugs reported reads less like fundamental design failure and more like exactly what under-resourced testing at this scope would predict.

Value

At NZ$22.49, Tales of Old: Dominus is priced well below what its advertised scope would typically command, and that gap is the single most repeated argument in its favour across the review corpus — reviewers on both sides of the Mixed score consistently frame the price as reasonable, even generous, for what's being attempted. The Mixed rating itself, sitting close to an even split between recommend and not-recommend across 141 reviews, reflects a genuine divide between players willing to treat the November 2025 launch as an ambitious, still-rough foundation worth the low asking price, and players who ran into the specific, repeated bugs described above and concluded the game currently isn't finished enough to recommend at any price. Both positions are well supported by the evidence its own players have left behind, and a buyer's decision here should rest more on tolerance for bugs than on doubt about the underlying design's potential.