Glass Shards: an action RPG that takes open worlds seriously again

Glass Shards misleads you for the first half hour: a wide valley, a tower in the distance, four quest markers along the edge of the screen. Then the game takes those markers away one by one. By hour three the map is empty — all you have are the places you have seen.

Not a map, a gaze

That is the design spine: wherever you look, something is there, and nothing forces you toward it. Crossing one valley I found three separate side stories, none of which ever appeared in my quest log. Northlight Studio calls it an attention economy; in plainer terms, the game does not tell you what to do, it shows you what you can do.

Combat: weight and rhythm

Swings have weight. Every strike closes the window on the next one, which makes combos a reading exercise rather than memorisation. There is no difficulty slider; instead the enemy count and the composition of each group change. When you struggle, the game does not hand you an easier fight, it shows you a different route.

Not once in sixty hours did I feel I was there to close a quest. That is a compliment.

Against it

The inventory UI is stuck in 2015: eight tabs, three clicks, one copy action. Load screens run past four seconds even on Series X. And the final act breaks the silence the previous fifty hours built, with narration it did not need.

Verdict

A confidence the open-world genre has not shown in years. The game trusts you and you return the favour. It promises the best ten hours of the year and instead delivers the best sixty.