There’s a great deal of romance attached to leading a medieval revolution against an oppressive regime, thanks in no small part to the myths surrounding Robin Hood and his Merry Men. The reality would have been much colder, darker and damp, but Bellwright is a game that latches onto that idealised fantasy and runs with it, tasking you with liberating the lands and building an army strong enough to stand against the Crown.
Heading into Steam Early Access later this month on 23rd April, Bellwright is an impressively broad game that’s sure to appeal to an awful lot of PC gamers out there.
In essence, you can boil Bellwright down to being a blend of a survival game with strategy layered on top, but this certainly looks to be a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
The early game will naturally focus on gathering, hunting, building and crafting, but alongside establishing your starting camp, you’ll also be recruiting NPCs to join you and your cause. That’s really where this game will stand out compared to the bulk of the Survival genre, and getting a preview of a mid-game Bellwright save showed us just how far these settlements can go. Sure, you’ll be liberating villages across the land, but your base camps can easily be the size of villages in their own right!
Within that comes the strategic and management side of the game. To a large extent, you can leave a base to manage itself and NPCs will automatically handle jobs like farming or any construction and crafting tasks you set, but you can also go hands-on and start to micromanage things and fiddle with overall town management with a priority system. All of these jobs have a physical element to them, with NPCs having to physically go and fell trees and bring them back to make buildings, or go through the process of getting seeds from storage, plant them, ensure they’re watered and eventually harvest the crops.
Of course, as you look to foment rebellion, you’ll also need to bear arms. As your settlements grow, they’ll be a more and more tempting target for raids by other factions, and have a more difficult time defending yourself from them. Anyone can pick up weapons, but each NPC has their own particular stats and capabilities that you’ll want to take into account when assigning guard duty, or who you’ll take with you in a roving warband of your own.
Mount & Blade has been an inspiration for Bellwright’s combat system, so there’s a skill-based directional combat system for trying to stick baddies with the pointy bits of your weapons, and there’s a wide selection of medieval weapons to choose from, with swords, axes, mauls, polearms, bow & arrow and more.
You’ll also have a group of chosen NPCs running around alongside you and getting stuck into the fight as well, with a simplistic looking set of commands to direct your forces. In fact, you can let the NPCs do all the fighting for you, if you’re not up to the task yourself. On another strategic layer, you’ll need to build up a kind of war chest of resources, ensuring that you pack and take enough food to sustain whatever size army you set out with.
There’s some nice design choices here in the name of being a fun and enjoyable game, though – this isn’t really a medieval mil sim. So you aren’t massively punished should you fall in battle, and will just respawn back at town with all your weapons and items still in your inventory, hopefully avoiding save scumming and keeping you in the game. NPCs are also similarly durable, and will return to base if they’re downed in battle. They will, however, have a wounded status applied to them and if they are downed again before they can heal up, they will be dead and buried. It’s a nice compromise toward the Iron Man modes of XCOM or Fire Emblem without being too hardcore.
There’s also fast travel in the game, with the ability to construct sign posts that you can can use to jump to different points of your burgeoning territory. When the world map is 25 km2, that’s pretty handy.
For the overarching game and narrative, you can’t just stomp around the world and claim territory. Instead liberation has to happen with the will of the people, so you have to build up trust with the villages of an area, before being able to put up a Belltower that signals their point of rebellion. That will trigger a big battle where you fight alongside the villagers.
And all of this can be played either solo or in co-op with friends. There’s no hosted servers for Bellwright with the onus being on players to host their own games and playing at their own pace.
Since previews last year, developer Donkey Crew has added a winter season that you’ll have to factor in when stocking up on supplies, and revised a number of systems to fan feedback. Of course, they’re far from done, and it could be a few years before they consider the game to be truly “finished”.
High on the to-do list for early access are things like adding walls so that you can create stronger fortresses, then siege systems to counteract them. They have also used AI-generated voices through development thus far, explaining that this is so they can quickly iterate and make changes to the story and dialogue without the uncertainty of actor availability over multiple years, but with the intent to bring in voice actors for a more concerted, consistent recording effort.
With Bellwright’s launch into Steam Early Access later this month, players can already experience that medieval rebellion fantasy, while we can’t wait to see just how broad Donkey Crew’s aspirations are.
