Terrinoth®: Heroes of Descent

Terrinoth®: Heroes of Descent released on Steam on June 7, 2026 from Artefacts Studio and Shine Group, the team behind Dungeons of Naheulbeuk, published by New Tales at $34.99. It adapts the fantasy world of the Descent board game into a mission-based, turn-based tactical RPG, sending a party of heroes through dungeons and encounters across the world of Terrinoth in pursuit of a central campaign story.

A genuinely likeable tactical RPG at its core

The reception for the solo campaign specifically is strong, and for good reason. Reviewers consistently praise the cast of heroes for having real, distinct personality rather than functioning as interchangeable stat blocks, comparisons to Baldur's Gate 3 and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous come up unprompted from players describing the character writing as a genuine strength. Combat itself lands well too: fast, three-action-per-turn tactics that are quick to learn, animations that can be sped up to keep pacing snappy, and an exploration structure between missions, buying gear, leveling up, that several reviewers single out as a faithful, well-translated adaptation of what makes the source board game work. The soundtrack and audio mixing draw specific, repeated praise as well, an easy thing to overlook in a tactics game but one reviewers clearly noticed and appreciated.

Multiplayer as the launch's clear failure point

Set against that, co-op multiplayer is the game's dominant complaint, and it's not a minor one. Reviewers across multiple languages independently report the same specific problems: desynchronization between host and joined players, connection drops that prevent rejoining an in-progress session, and turns that get stuck, unable to end or activate abilities, effectively halting a session outright. One reviewer bluntly compares the state of the netcode to a game that shipped without the developer ever having actually played their own co-op mode internally. That's a serious charge for a game explicitly marketed with co-op as a headline feature, and it's corroborated closely enough across independent reviewers that it reads as an accurate description of the launch state rather than an isolated bad session.

The gap between the campaign's quality and multiplayer's brokenness has split the review base in a specific, legible way: negative reviews cluster heavily around multiplayer sessions, while positive reviews, including detailed, high-playtime ones, consistently specify they're rating the solo experience, several explicitly warning other buyers away from co-op for now while still recommending the purchase overall. That's a useful signal for anyone deciding whether to buy: this is a campaign-first purchase for the time being, not a co-op-first one.

Smaller frictions beyond the headline issues

Beyond multiplayer stability, a handful of smaller complaints recur across an otherwise well-regarded launch. Later missions lean on repeated reinforcement waves that some reviewers find pads difficulty artificially rather than testing tactical skill, and build customization per character, while present, is described by more experienced tactics-genre players as fairly shallow compared to genre peers. An odd but specific technical complaint also appears more than once: the game pulls high GPU usage even while idling at the main menu, a minor but easily fixable oversight that nonetheless shows up in enough separate reviews to suggest it's a genuine, unaddressed bug rather than one player's unusual hardware configuration.

What board-game fans specifically get right

For players who come in already familiar with Descent or the wider Terrinoth setting from Fantasy Flight Games' tabletop line, the adaptation earns real, specific praise for how it handles that source material. One reviewer, evidently a longtime board-game fan, describes the transition as fully playable and enjoyable without any prior knowledge of the lore, while still rewarding familiarity for those who bring it, a difficult balance for any licensed adaptation to strike and one this team clearly put real thought into. The turn-by-turn structure, mission briefings before deployment, resource management that resets between individual encounters rather than requiring careful rationing across an entire dungeon crawl, translates the board game's pacing into something that works specifically as a video game rather than feeling like a board game clumsily ported to a screen. Reviewers who name-check other genre touchstones, Divinity: Original Sin, Marvel's Midnight Suns, Expedition 33, generally place Terrinoth as a simpler, more approachable entry in that company rather than a peer in scope, a framing that seems accurate and not unkind: it's aiming for a tighter, more digestible experience than a full CRPG, and largely achieves that goal within the campaign's roughly 20 to 30 hour length that multiple reviewers independently report.

Difficulty and pacing draw more mixed reactions once players reach the campaign's second act, where several reviewers describe a noticeable escalation, more demanding encounters, harder-hitting reinforcement waves, arriving abruptly enough to catch underprepared parties off guard. That's not necessarily a flaw on its own, tactics games benefit from a real difficulty curve, but it's worth flagging for players used to a steadier ramp, since the jump is sharp enough that multiple independent reviewers mention it as a specific transition point rather than a gradual trend.

Verdict

Terrinoth: Heroes of Descent succeeds where it matters most for a tactics RPG, likeable characters, tight combat, and a faithful sense of its board-game source material, but its co-op mode is currently broken enough to actively warn people away from at launch. At $34.99, it's a solid recommendation for solo play or for tactics fans who enjoyed Dungeons of Naheulbeuk, with the clear caveat that anyone buying specifically for co-op should wait for netcode fixes before committing.