Yaga

Ivan is a blacksmith with one hand and no luck at all. Cursed to fail at everything he attempts, he's nonetheless conscripted by a paranoid tzar to complete a string of impossible tasks, all while the witch Baba Yaga watches his fate play out from the margins with what reads, in the game's dialogue, as genuine amusement. It's a distinctive premise for an action RPG, rendered by Romanian studio Breadcrumbs Interactive in striking hand-drawn 2D art and scored by a Romanian folk-hip-hop soundtrack from the band Subcarpați — genuinely unusual territory for the genre, and the specific thing that's kept Yaga on people's radar seven years after it first released for iOS on 25 October 2019, followed by PC, PS4, Xbox One and Switch versions on 12 November that year. (Steam's own store page lists a January 2021 date — that's the game's arrival on that specific storefront after an earlier stint exclusive to the Epic Games Store, not the original release, which happened over a year earlier.)

What critics said at launch, and what players still say now

What makes Yaga an unusually clean case study, seven years out, is how little the conversation around it has moved. Launch critics were genuinely mixed rather than warm — an aggregate 65 across 17 outlets, with only 24% recommending it — and the specific shape of that reception has held remarkably steady. Reviewers at the time praised the atmosphere and personality unreservedly: "Yaga has bags of personality and benefits greatly from being steeped in superbly atmospheric Slavic folklore," read one contemporary review, before adding that "the amazing theme and artwork just can't carry the lackluster gameplay." Another described "some pretty average combat, pedestrian level design" dragging against an otherwise distinctive game.

Pull a negative-review sample from Steam today, spanning January 2021 through September 2025, and the same two-part argument reappears with striking consistency. "I really wanted to like this game," reads one representative review. "I loved the artstyle, music and dialog. However, the combat and crafting is not very good." Another, from a player who spent 405 minutes with the game before giving up on it, is blunter: "I could write an essay about how poor the system of combat and crafting is in Yaga, but it's a problem of the very core of the game and it's not fixable." That specific framing — a genuine, detailed appreciation for everything around the fighting, paired with a conviction that the fighting itself is a structural rather than a superficial problem — shows up again and again, in reviews written years apart by players who've clearly never seen each other's.

Where the combat specifically breaks down

The complaints aren't vague. One especially detailed review lays out the mechanical chain precisely: Ivan's stamina bar drains with every dodge roll, which is manageable in isolated fights, but most human enemies carry shields that block frontal attacks and can only be stripped using a grappling hook — which also costs stamina. Group encounters against multiple shielded enemies turn stamina management into what the reviewer calls "kind of a nightmare," made worse by enemies dealing roughly a third of Ivan's health per hit and a healing system that punishes overuse by building toward its own failure state. It's a genuinely specific, mechanically literate complaint rather than a vague "combat bad" dismissal, and it maps cleanly onto the broader, repeated pattern across the review sample: not that the fighting is too hard, but that it's repetitive and imbalanced in ways that make encounters feel like a chore rather than a test.

Sitting alongside combat, a weapon-durability system — tools break with use and must be replaced or repaired — draws its own specific dislike. "I hate the idea of a weapon being able to break," reads one 2025 review, "it doesn't bring anything to the game except bringing inconvenience." It's a mechanic that, on paper, should deepen the game's crafting systems by creating ongoing demand for materials; in practice, reviewers consistently describe it as friction without payoff, adding busywork to combat that many already found tiring rather than giving crafting a meaningful reason to exist.

The reputation system, and what the achievement data shows

Yaga's more genuinely interesting systemic idea — a reputation and personality mechanic that shapes Ivan's story and available skills based on player choices across the run — gets a more mixed reception. Several reviewers credit it with real narrative texture, but one detailed review notes that "tying progression to your character's attitude seems cool but doesn't seem to" fully follow through, without elaborating much further — a sense that the idea is more interesting in concept than in the moment-to-moment result. The global achievement data offers a useful, concrete window into how far that system's payoff actually reaches: the starting achievement, appropriately named for Ivan's one-handed blacksmith trade, sits at 90.3% completion, but the game's multiple distinct endings — including specific tzar and death outcomes — sit at just 1.0-1.3% each. That's a steep enough drop to suggest most players who finish the game see it once and move on, rather than replaying to explore how differently the story can resolve, which is presumably the entire point of building a reputation-driven branching narrative in the first place.

Verdict

Yaga is a genuinely distinctive, well-realised piece of world-building — Slavic folklore is rare territory for an action RPG, the hand-drawn art and Subcarpați soundtrack give it a personality few other games in the genre have, and the writing and voice acting carry real dark-comic charm. What's kept it from climbing higher than Very Positive, consistently, across seven years and two separate audiences (professional critics at launch, and the players who've bought it since), is a combat and crafting loop that both groups independently arrived at nearly identical complaints about: too repetitive, too stamina-starved, and undercut rather than deepened by a weapon-durability system that adds friction without adding depth. That consistency across time and audience is itself the most useful piece of evidence here — this was never a launch-week rough patch that got smoothed out later. It's a fixed part of what the game is.

6.5 out of 10. A beautifully realised, distinctively voiced world let down by a combat system that critics flagged in November 2019 and players are still flagging today — worth playing for the folklore, the art and the soundtrack, best bought on a sale given how little the core complaint has moved in seven years.