Phileasson’s Secret is the lone expansion pack to Radon Labs’ easy-to-miss gem Drakensang: The River of Time. Like the main game, it took a full year to be released in English, and saw a quiet, clumsy release. Where The River of Time did get a retail release but only in parts of Western Europe, Phileasson’s Secret is a digital-only release available exclusively in North America, and works only with digital versions of the game, so too bad if you received the retail by way of import. As with The River of Time, I’m baffled by the treatment of this product, but is this a title you shouldn’t miss out on like the main game was?
Phileasson’s Secret isn’t one big chunk of late-game content – instead, it offers two new quests that are split into three parts, which unlock as the player reaches new areas during the main storyline. One is the big, main quest that tells the story of Phileasson, and the other is a smaller, tangentially related sub-quest. If you have a final save game, you can just pick up and play both with a high-level character, but it seems to have been designed and balanced to be played as additional content for a new character as it unlocks new stages. I jumped in with a level six character and that worked pretty well.
The smaller of the two quests is a treasure hunt that leads you to a pair of caves. It’s a cute little side distraction that has a few small surprises in store for you, but it doesn’t do anything interesting with its decent premise, and despite the “treasure hunt” story it doesn’t really let you figure out puzzles or maps as much as you’d hope, other than once providing a set of instructions guiding you to a cave entrance. The caves are short with easy and quick fights. It’s a nice little extra, but it’s not what you’re paying for when you buy this add-on.
Essentially, you are paying for the main quest, which explores a lot of things that earlier Drakensang titles didn’t have a chance to highlight yet. It opens up with Thorwalians (vikings) sailing in on their Ottajaskos (longships), and introduces captain Asleif “Foggwulf” Phileasson, a legendary character that has featured in the lore of the pen and paper The Dark Eye for more than a decade. Phileasson takes off before the player reaches the ships, and following him you find yourself in a very unusual setting indeed: an ancient “elemental city” named Tie’Shianna, one of the legendary realms of the high elves in the world of the Dark Eye. The player also gets to meet a Moha, one of a tribal forest-dwelling society.
This setting and added flavor is the add-on’s main strength. The city is set in the desert area of Khom, and with this high elven culture being as yet unexplored in video games Radon Labs did a good job giving it a real feel of an ancient, magical desert civilization. The actual playing area inside the city isn’t that big, and the party comes back to the same area several times. But the areas are visually quite open, and you can see the other, non-available parts of the town in the background, which helps make it feel less constrained but also serves as a reminder of how much better it would be if this was a large, fully fleshed-out town.
The Dark Eye pen and paper players will probably get more out of the setting because they come in with the right questions, such as (how can this town even exist at this time?), whereas new players don’t automatically get the same sense, and the add-on doesn’t do a great job setting up the location and its importance, or the importance of what the player is doing. Gradually it becomes clear that you have a part to play in the struggle against the Nameless One, but at the same time not everything is what it seems, both in people’s allegiances, motivations and the nature of the setting. The problem is that while the plot is interesting, it seems somewhat incidental, largely delivered in dialog chunks at the start and end of each trip back to Tie’Shianna. This is less than ideal to keep the player’s attention, and doesn’t feel particularly rewarding or interactive, which ruins what could potentially have been a pretty good story.
That said, Phileasson’s Secret is fully voice acted, with a pretty good translation for the game’s dialog, no Engrish in sight. Forgrimm returns as the narrator, and several new cast members have plenty to talk about. Like the River of Time, the voice acting is a bit uneven, with some performances being pretty good, like Phileasson, and others being a bit flat, like Amariel. There’s not nearly as much dialog as the River of Time, but still they invested in better localization than I’ve seen for more well-promoted titles.
Where this add-on falls apart is in its overall quest structure. It is essentially one long, linear combat romp with highly repetitive sequences against a low variety of enemies. It recycles a few enemies from the main game, such as rock goblins and golems, and offers a few that are essentially reskins of orcs and ogres, but it does add new enemies in adding horde mutants (using the werewolf skeleton) and horde leaders, as well as the scarab enemy type. The problem is not so much variety as the fact that the game throws a handful of warriors and archers at you over and over again, or offers a cave with basically the same elemental fight over and over.
The developers do add some variety, adding allies to join the party, different combat setups, special support structures with party-boosting and opponent-weakening effects. While the design of the fights and the variety of opponents of opponents are rather weak, the biggest problem lies in the fact that the add-on doesn’t offer enough outside of these combat encounters. It’s about ten hours long, and the majority of that time is spent in combat. There are hardly any quests not involving combat. The town if Tie’Shianna is barely fleshed out even in the more peaceful moments.
In pretty much every way, it feels like the design regressed to the first Drakensang title, which similarly leaned on filler combat over other kinds of content to fill your gameplay hours. Where the River of Time improved on that, Phileasson’s Secret goes right back to this style of design. Similarly, the plot isn’t as interesting, primarily due to the way it is structured and delivered here, and the lack of fleshing out the main characters’ motivations and backgrounds.
That’s why I have a harder time recommending this as post-game content than as during-game content. It’s not great either way, but if you play it separately its flaws stand out, while if you play it as part of the main campaign as a first-time or repeat player it balances out better, as it offers an unexciting but very different experience from the core game, and that kind of variety helps.
If you’re looking for an item- and adventure point-fest, it gives a fair amount of both, but not exactly top-level ones. One thing it does well is adding a uniqueness to the magical items, which I’ve always felt was a strength of the Das Schwarze Auge system. As an example, a “ring of water” will protect you from fire effects by putting a permanent raincloud above your head, and that hits exactly the right unique and quirky note fans might expect. The add-on also adds a temporary companion, but sadly they did not leap on the opportunity to add a permanent companion to the party. Obviously, Phileasson isn’t going to end up traveling with you, but with a little rewriting and crafting of an interesting high elf guard or Thorwalian NPC, the developers could have expanded the options for the player party. One that would have been a big improvement, too, since the limited party options are one of the core game’s biggest flaws, offering only four options for three follower slots.
Ultimatelly, missed opportunities is kind of the theme of this add-on. They picked a great, unique setting to work in, did a good job on the visuals and crafted a solid story, but effectively ruin it by offering it in the form of a tedious combat romp. This add-on is currently 10 bucks on Steam, and the core game is 20 bucks, and that totals up to a great value for one of the better RPGs released this year. But if you’ve already finished the main game, I wouldn’t jump on this post-game content unless you’re desperately itching for more.
