REVIEW – Here we have a love story that could have worked well enough on its own, but once again the whole thing collapses at the execution stage, and that leaves you wondering whether this project might have been better off as an animated film rather than a video game. Aeta is in love with Bianca, but the road to that love is bloody and… buggy, absurd as that sounds.

This medieval Italian adventure, in this form, feels more chaotic than enjoyable.

A Revenge Story

How many times have we seen the same setup already? A small village gets looted, its inhabitants are slaughtered, the protagonist’s lover is kidnapped, and off they go with a weapon in hand to seek revenge. That is essentially the story of this game. The small twist is that the central couple is a lesbian pair, and one of the main characters is voiced by Jennifer English. There are a few potentially interesting ideas here, but that alone is not enough. What does make it somewhat thought-provoking is the fact that same-sex relationships were hardly accepted in the Middle Ages, and the whole situation is made even uglier by the plague. We are in the middle of the 14th century, after all, when people are dropping like flies, and those still alive are often tempted toward less than lawful paths.

The game’s clearest strength is its voice acting. Jennifer English and Alby Baldwin do the heavy lifting here, and together they make for a distinctly passionate pair. On the audio side, that works. Visually, not so much: the character models and facial animations are simply laughably weak. What stood out the most was how enormous everybody’s mouth looks, as if an old Hungarian one-liner about oversized faces had been written specifically for them. That is obviously an exaggeration, but the result is still reminiscent of the awkward character work you used to see in the early CGI videos of Eiffel 65.

To be fair, 1348 Ex Voto can be atmospheric at times, because the locations are occasionally attractive and varied. In some stretches, it was genuinely more enjoyable to stop by a lakeside or just admire the scenery than to engage with the gameplay itself. At least that helped me forget for a moment that the level design was deceptive and repetitive, and with no minimap in sight, the experience often became frustrating. Places you need to jump to can blend into the background so completely that you may not realize they are the correct route on the first try – or even the fifth.

That is probably why the full playthrough can stretch to six or seven hours, because without all that wandering and second-guessing, you could comfortably reach the end in around four. In the meantime, you just keep swinging your sword, since weapon switching barely exists at all. It essentially comes down to one-handed or two-handed. You block attacks or dodge them. There is no room for creativity in combat, because the only strategy that really works is a defensive one. You wait for your enemy to finish its combo, then exploit the opening, otherwise they will simply outpace you. And you have to go through that routine with every single opponent. That makes combat feel clumsy and exhausting – and it is, especially when there is basically one enemy type doing most of the work. The lack of polish is impossible to miss.

2026 Ex Lux Aeterna

Aeta herself is also awkward to control. Something like this might have been tolerated back in 1996 in the original Tomb Raider, but that does not make it acceptable here. Quite often, there is a delay between pressing a button and seeing Aeta respond. Because of that, defense has to be planned in advance, and even then it does not always work, because there were moments when our heroine simply refused to perform one of the defensive actions I asked her to do.

Then there is the gangbang factor – not in the adult sense – because in more than a few fights you end up facing several enemies at once. Those encounters are not easy to handle, even if the enemies technically wait their turn. And when several of them come at you at once, you can only properly defend against one of them. Congratulations, because combat is supposed to be the biggest pillar of 1348 Ex Voto. Its biggest problem is that it feels completely unfinished.

You can feel that in the story too, because it regularly jumps from one thing to another in ways that make little sense, including the movement between locations. Why is it that Aeta gets knocked down by enemies more than once, yet is never captured a single time? And why do major events sometimes get reduced to two brief lines of text as if something important happened off-screen and the game just expects you to move on? The end result is that the whole thing feels deeply underdeveloped in narrative terms as well, and that is a shame – it may not be an exaggeration to say that with another six months of work, this could have turned into something far more memorable.

A Forgettable Love Story

There is almost nothing genuinely good in 1348 Ex Voto. It gets a 5/10 solely because Sedleo did not ruin the voice work. A handful of locations look nice, but that is about it. Maybe Aeta’s hair deserves an honorable mention, but even that is more of a joke than a serious compliment. Everything else is mediocre at best or downright poor.

At this point, you cannot honestly call this a good game. It feels unfinished. It is not recommended: confusing story jumps, clumsy and overly restrictive combat, ridiculous character models, idiotic and sometimes unreadable level design, and on top of all that, it is short. Taken together, all you can really say about this game is that it is forgettable. Bianca might as well remain a prisoner.

-V-

Developer: Sedleo

Publisher: Dear Villagers

Release Date: March 12, 2026

Genre: Action-adventure