The Last Oricru

Some games earn their reputation on launch day and never shake it. The Last Oricru is a harder case: an eight-years-in-development project from a roughly ten-person Czech studio, GoldKnights, that shipped in October 2022 broken enough to land on Metacritic's list of the year's ten worst-reviewed games -- and then spent the following year quietly becoming a meaningfully better game underneath the exact same bones. Both things are true at once, and this review tries to hold both.

An ambitious story wrapped in a rough shell

Strip away the jank and there's a genuinely unusual structure here. Players control Silver, a soldier stranded on an alien world caught between two warring civilisations, and the choices made throughout -- who to side with, who to trust, which faction's cause to champion -- lead to real, branching consequences rather than cosmetic dialogue variation. One of the most detailed positive reviews in this game's history breaks down "mutually-excluding and regular choices that affect alliances, story events and sometimes available locations" as the game's clearest strength, and that's a rare, genuinely ambitious swing for a studio this size to take. Reviewers repeatedly reach for Gothic, Elex and Two Worlds as points of comparison -- scrappy, janky European RPGs that traded polish for genuine narrative ambition -- and The Last Oricru earns that comparison more than most games that invite it.

The launch that defined its reputation

What that ambition ran into was a launch build widely described as broken. Detailed negative reviews from October 2022 catalogue crashes, a character panel that displayed wrong numbers on levelling, missing item tooltips, uncustomisable controls, no field-of-view slider and aggressive post-processing effects that couldn't be disabled -- the kind of basic technical gaps one reviewer compared directly to "early 2000s console ports." Metacritic's own year-end tally named it one of 2022's ten worst-reviewed games, a genuinely rare distinction that follows the game to this day regardless of what's changed since.

Combat that never quite escapes the jank label

Even setting the technical bugs aside, the core soulslike combat draws consistent criticism for feeling stiff -- animations that several reviewers call choppy, a stamina system that drains aggressively under enemy pressure, and an upgrade system at the game's terminals that one detailed review calls "resource intensive for very minimal benefits." It's not universally panned -- some reviewers specifically praise how approachable the difficulty becomes once a player levels up a bit, and enemy variety draws real praise from fans of the genre -- but "jank" is the single most repeated word across the entire review corpus, applied by both its harshest critics and its most affectionate fans.

No saves, by design

One specific structural choice draws unusually sharp, sustained disagreement: there's no manual save-and-reload system. The developers have stated this is intentional, forcing players to live with the consequences of choices and fights rather than reloading around them. Several reviewers find this genuinely adds weight to the branching story -- missing a fight's loot permanently because a save-scum retry isn't available is exactly the kind of stakes a choice-driven RPG should have. Just as many find it simply frustrating, particularly when it collides with the game's technical rough edges rather than its narrative ones.

Co-op: the game's best idea, imperfectly executed

Full campaign co-op is the feature reviewers cite most often as unexpectedly memorable -- multiple describe playing through the entire story with a friend as genuinely funny and bonding, jank and all, calling it an unexpected "co-op game of the year" candidate for how much more enjoyable the experience becomes shared. The same feature, though, drew specific reports of desync issues and progression-blocking bugs badly enough that at least one player described their co-op partner getting stuck unable to move through an entire city zone. The Final Cut update specifically targeted co-op stability, and reviewers who tried it after the patch report noticeably fewer of these issues than the launch-week reports.

What a year of patches actually bought it

The most important context for judging this game fairly in 2026 is that the version on sale now isn't the version that launched in October 2022. The free Final Cut update, released roughly a year later, reworked difficulty progression, added a long-missing in-game map and hint system, improved boss fights and combat feel, and fixed a real share of the co-op bugs above. Reviewers who played after that update consistently describe a more competent, better- paced game than the one that earned its rough launch reputation -- one detailed post-patch review explicitly frames its 1.0 self as "a buggy mess of crashes and unplayable behaviour" that "is no longer the case." Global achievement data offers a supporting data point: the earliest story achievements sit around 55-64% completion, falling to under 2% for the hardest late-game and secret-ending unlocks, a curve consistent with a real playerbase working through most of a lengthy branching campaign rather than abandoning it early en masse.

Final verdict

The Last Oricru is a genuinely difficult game to score fairly, because the version that earned its reputation as one of 2022's worst-reviewed releases isn't quite the version being sold today. What's here now is a scrappy, ambitious, still-janky Eurojank RPG with a real branching story, a distinctive alien-medieval setting and a co-op mode that's become its most fondly remembered feature -- built by a small studio that clearly cared more about narrative ambition than technical polish, and spent a year proving it hadn't given up on the latter either. It's not a game for players chasing tight combat or technical confidence, but for the specific audience that loves Gothic-style jank in service of a story that actually branches, there's real value here at a budget price, particularly with a co-op partner along for the ride.