Banquet for Fools made me fill a real notebook, and I’m still torn after 40 hours

Banquet for Fools is the first CRPG in years that forced me to move my keyboard, clear some space on my desk, and put a physical notebook down next to my mouse. Not “oh this might be handy” note-taking-the game more or less refuses to function unless you become your own quest log, cartographer, and archivist.

After about 40 hours on PC and a handful more on Steam Deck, I’m stuck in that weird place where I can’t stop recommending it to the right kind of sicko, but I also can’t pretend it didn’t occasionally make me want to Alt+F4 and go play something that actually tells me where the hell the “old marsh shrine” is.

Thrown into a nightmare party with no hand-holding

The opening is a statement of intent. You wake at a festival gone catastrophically wrong: blood everywhere, panicked NPCs, some sort of towering bird-headed figure giving you a cryptic blessing before the game catapults you centuries into the future. It’s surreal and disorienting in a way that wouldn’t feel out of place in Pathologic.

You build a four-person party from an offbeat roster-pub guards, odd-jobbers, vaguely mystical weirdos rather than your classic fighter-mage-thief lineup-and land in a lonely settlement with two goals that sound specific but really aren’t: figure out why the nearby town of Din Varens is empty, and reach a lighthouse on the coast.

My instincts from a lifetime of RPGs kicked in: finish the dialogue, open the quest log, scan for objective markers. I hit the menu button, tabbed around, and felt my stomach drop a little.

No quest log. No conversation history. The map is mostly blank, and the only “marker” on it is whatever I type into the freeform notes box myself.

Banquet for Fools shrugs, says “Topa-din!” (one of its cheerful local greetings), and expects you to keep up. That first hour set the tone: this is a game that assumes you’re paying attention, and punishes you when you aren’t.

The notebook is the real main character

Once I accepted that nothing was going to be written down for me, the game clicked in a way that surprised me. Banquet for Fools has a basic in-game notes panel, but it’s just a big, blank text field. You decide what matters. I lasted about ten minutes before I grabbed an actual paper notebook and started scribbling like it was 1999 and I’d just rented a copy of Morrowind.

Every island, road, and suspicious landmark got its own bullet points:

• “Guard captain at western gate only at dusk – asks about missing brother?”
• “Peppura harvest worries – maybe seasonal quest?”
• “Ghost-chanting woman near graveyard; repels spirits after payment.”
• “Rowboat man in Din Varens: only sails to two ports, expensive but safe route.”

On the in-game world map, you can type labels directly onto regions you’ve visited. No fancy icons, no auto-tagging. If I wanted “LIKELY BANDIT CAMP – BRING ANTIDOTES” to sit on the northern cliffs, I had to write it myself. Forget to label a fork in the road? That’s on you when you lose half a day’s travel retracing your steps.

Spells and abilities lean into this too. Certain custom spells need you to name them and draw their icon using a simple in-game sketch tool. It sounds like a gimmick, but after a few hours I had a page where “Tetherlash” was doodled as a little hooked chain, and “Rain Quiet” was a series of vertical dots—just enough that my brain instantly recognized what I’d made.

Scrolls and letters you find are barely digested for you. Longhand notes, strange diagrams, and half-legible warnings are presented almost as artifacts, and the game doesn’t highlight “the important sentence” in a different color. Sometimes the clue is in the art on the edge of the page, not in the text. More than once I wrote “check scroll with concentric circles for marsh puzzle???”, closed the game, and then had to flip back through my notes next session to remember what I was even talking about.

This all sounds like cosplay immersion, but it changes how you relate to the game. By hour 10 I remembered NPC names and their routines in a way I rarely do in more streamlined RPGs. I knew what crops were failing, who was feuding with whom, and which ghost-chanter I trusted to keep spirits at bay. Because if I didn’t care, I’d get lost—socially and geographically.

Travel is slow, scary, and kind of wonderful

The world layout is mostly sparsely populated islands and rough hinterlands, stitched together by thin footpaths and boat routes. There’s technically fast travel, but “fast” is generous. You pay boatmen to ferry you between ports, and not all ports connect. It’s more like catching a rural bus than teleporting.

Walking has weight. With a strict day/night cycle and survival systems, travel isn’t just “time passing” in the background. Food spoils if you hoard it too long. Your party gets worn down. Weather rolls in. If you decide to cut through a marsh at dusk because some villager mumbled that “the thing” is “somewhere in the reeds,” that’s a real commitment.

One of my worst/greatest moments came around hour 15. I’d loaded up on just enough provisions to make a sprint to a mountain hamlet I’d only heard about in rumors. The plan: climb in a single day, talk to the reclusive healer there, and sleep in their inn. Reality: I took a wrong fork, wound up deep in a bandit-infested ravine, and burned all my decent food surviving a fight I should never have picked. By the time I crested the right ridge, night had fallen, my last clean water had spoiled, and I could see ghost lights drifting between the trees below me.

I’ve walked across giant RPG maps plenty of times, but this felt genuinely risky. When I stumbled across a small camp—a handful of travelers, a guarded fire, someone willing to sell me stale bread—it landed like finding a save point in a survival horror game.

The payoff to all that friction is that the world settles into your bones. Enemies generally don’t respawn, so clearing a brutal path through the wilds stays meaningful. Ten hours after I first crawled through a bandit-heavy forest at 2 HP, I was casually hiking the same route to reach a distant shrine, remembering old fights like personal war stories.

Combat: Baldur’s Gate meets scrappy beat ’em up

Banquet for Fools is real-time with pause on paper, but in practice it feels closer to a slow, tactical brawler. You directly control one character at a time, queueing actions on a shared cooldown bar, and can hop between party members or let their AI scripts handle the basics.

Dodging is manual. Enemies actually wind up and swing, and if you sidestep at the right moment, the attack just whiffs through empty space. There’s none of that invisible “to hit roll” nonsense keeping you in danger because a die said so—if you’re not in the path of the axe, you’re fine. If you are, you’re getting chunked.

Heavier abilities often have little timing windows, almost like a rudimentary fighting game: hit the prompt in the sweet spot and you get bonus stagger, morale buffs, or bigger cones of effect. Rally attacks, where one character shouts and the others surge forward, feel great when you nail the timing and terrible when you miss and watch the wave of enemies crash into you instead.

The movesets themselves lean scrappy rather than glamorous. You’ve got kicks to knock enemies down slopes, charges that scatter tight formations, pins that hold a dangerous monster in place while your mage does the real damage. High-level magic feels powerful, but the game never lets you forget that sometimes the most efficient play is just to boot a guy into a campfire.

The movesets themselves lean scrappy rather than glamorous. You’ve got kicks to knock enemies down slopes, charges that scatter tight formations, pins that hold a dangerous monster in place while your mage does the real damage. High-level magic feels powerful, but the game never lets you forget that sometimes the most efficient play is just to boot a guy into a campfire.

Because combat isn’t random and enemies mostly stay dead, every hostile encounter feels like a little investment. Clear out one cluster of poison-spitters at the edge of a bog and you’ve effectively inscribed “safer marsh route” into the map—again, only if you remember to mark it in your notes.

Playing on PC with mouse and keyboard felt solid. The camera can get a bit cramped in dense forests when you’re trying to keep track of multiple threats, but the pacing is deliberate enough that I never felt like I died because the game was too fast; I died because I tunnel-visioned the wrong target or failed to spot a ranged attacker in the back.

What I really appreciated is that new abilities mostly expand your tactical vocabulary instead of just adding bigger numbers. When I unlocked a tackle that scattered clustered enemies, I immediately started rethinking how I approached camps. When I picked up a spell that temporarily exposed hidden foes, an earlier quest suddenly made sense: those “frightened children” on a random island weren’t quite who they seemed.

When mystery curdles into busywork

All that praise comes with a big caveat: Banquet for Fools is absolutely capable of wasting your time.

The same systems that make discoveries feel personal also mean the game often refuses to nudge you when you’re missing one tiny, crucial piece. Several times I knew exactly which quest I was working on, had explored everywhere that made sense, and was still stuck because the game’s idea of “information” was “it’s somewhere on the mountainside.” That’s cute once. The fifth time, after an evening of circling a huge zone with no success, I was grinding my teeth.

The strict day/night cycle doesn’t help. NPCs move around, shops close, events only trigger at certain hours. In theory, this makes the world feel alive. In practice, I had multiple nights where I was in the correct location for a quest, at the wrong time, with no clear signal that time was the problem. I’d give up, leave, and only later realize from some throwaway line in a note that “the spirits gather just before dawn.”

One quest in particular pushed me from “challenged” to “irritated.” I’d been told that clearing a region of monsters would allow a blessing to take hold. I swept the area three separate times, fought what felt like every living thing on the map, and still the flag wouldn’t trip. Hours later, in a forgotten corner behind a rock, I found a single minor creature just…hanging out, the one holdout silently blocking quest completion. That’s not mystery; that’s a pixel-hunt with extra steps.

The same goes for puzzles where the answer is buried in some ornate scroll you picked up ten hours earlier. I respect the refusal to pop up a “hey, maybe re-read this” hint. But there’s a limit to how many times I want to alt-tab through screenshots of parchment because I didn’t obsessively catalogue every swirl of ink when I first found it.

On my best nights, I felt like a detective piecing together a culture and its secrets through careful observation. On my worst, I felt like a courier sim forced to slog back and forth across the archipelago because I’d missed a single, brittle breadcrumb in an earlier conversation I couldn’t replay.

Performance and Steam Deck life

On my main PC (RTX 4080, Ryzen 7, 32GB RAM), Banquet for Fools ran smoothly at 4K with everything cranked. The claymation-like art style really benefits from the higher resolution—the slightly jerky animations and chunky models feel intentional, like a diorama come to life, not like budget jank.

I did notice brief hitches entering crowded settlements, especially when the day shifted to night and a bunch of lights popped on at once, but nothing game-breaking. Auto-saves are frequent enough that crashes would be more of an annoyance than a disaster; I personally didn’t hit any hard crashes in my time, just the occasional micro-stutter.

On Steam Deck, the story’s different but not dire. Running at a mix of low and medium settings, capped to 30 fps with FSR, it held up respectably. Battery life was around 2.5–3 hours in exploration-heavy sessions, less if I was doing long combat runs. The bigger problem wasn’t performance so much as readability: a lot of the hand-drawn UI, parchment text, and tiny icons get compressed to the point where I had to squint.

If you’re the kind of player this game is targeting—the kind who will happily fill a real notebook—you probably want to play primarily at a desk. The Deck is fine for grinding out a few fights or retracing a known route, but I wouldn’t want my first playthrough to be entirely handheld.

Who this brutal little feast is really for

This is not a universal crowd-pleaser. Banquet for Fools sits in the same mental shelf as games like Morrowind, Pathologic, and Outer Wilds—the ones that trust you to connect dots and don’t care if you bounce off.

If your favorite part of Baldur’s Gate 3 was optimizing builds and following tightly scripted questlines, this might feel hostile. There are builds and scripts here, sure, but the soul of the game is in wandering somewhere you probably shouldn’t be, piecing together local gossip about a peppura harvest and a missing chanter, and realizing three hours later that it all pointed to a shrine you walked past twice.

On the other hand, if you have fond memories of graph paper maps, of writing “hidden door?” in the margins of a notepad, of feeling genuinely lost in a world that doesn’t bend around you—this is catnip. The friction isn’t just difficulty; it’s identity. The absence of a quest log isn’t a missing feature, it’s the backbone of the whole thing.

Banquet for Fools is also a remarkably confident indie game. Developed and published by Hannah and Joseph Games, it takes big swings: claymation visuals, brawly real-time combat in an isometric CRPG, a notebook-driven UI that would’ve been focus-tested out of existence at a bigger studio. It feels personal, uncompromised, and sometimes downright stubborn.