‘Banquet for Fools’ Review: This Stunningly Tactile RPG Is a Bounty for the Senses

Three wiry elves and a burly yeti explore a cavern in Banquet for Fools. These warriors, resembling figurines sculpted out of fistfuls of clay, walk with a stop-motion gait, each step making a squelching sound as they pad along the mossy earth. Their labor is set to a sparse and melancholic score that feels as though it were conjured by a lyre-toting bard in a swamp.

The expedition, like most moments in the stunningly tactile Banquet for Fools, is a bounty for the senses. The tale begins, in the tradition of so many of the tabletop RPGs that the game channels, in a tavern. You create a party of guards who volunteer for a mission that will take them across Invimona—a recently settled tangle of islands that, as one character charmingly puts it, is haunted but not cursed. Your crew must brave ghosts, bandits, and all manner of beasts, navigating ancient ruins by foot and roiling tides by ship, to fulfill its duty.

Developed by Hannah and Joseph Games, Banquet for Fools eschews numerous mainstream video game design norms, resulting in much friction early on. The minimal tutorial is sequestered in the menu. The scant guidance you receive throughout your journey is granted and tracked diegetically: with scrolls and maps that sit in your inventory, and with a quest log that, rather than automatically updating itself, consists of text boxes for manual notetaking.

Meanwhile, surviving in the wilderness requires extensive and expensive preparation. The real-time with pause combat (shades of the masterful Vagrant Story) is unwieldy. And material rewards are elusive, opportunities for fast travel even rarer. But Banquet for Fools isn’t sadistic. It simply has confidence in its vision and in you, like a pen-and-paper game master who expects the world of you and will give you the world in return. It wants you to undertake an adventure of tangible stakes, to understand that the souls in your care have needs and deserve investment, to remember that dungeons aren’t fountains of loot but places shaped by distinct histories.

So the game pushes you to learn how to earn a living and afford supplies. It spurs you to tap into, and relish, the nuance and dynamism of its combat, with its grapples, charge attacks, and defensive maneuvers. It teaches you to cherish healing berries and thank the universe for equipment upgrades. It encourages you to reject modernity and embrace long walks home.

While playing, I thought frequently about an interview in which Itsuno Hideaki—director of Dragon’s Dogma and its sequel, a wondrous duology whose free-flowing trust in the player similarly evokes Dungeons and Dragons—reflected on fast travel mechanics. “Travel is boring? That’s not true,” he told IGN. “It’s only an issue because your game is boring.”

Itsuno was correct, and Banquet for Fools bears out his philosophy. The landscape’s myriad forks and hidden paths offer worthy prizes for your effort: sights and scenes that lend texture to Invimona and its denizens. If you overshoot a mysteriously abandoned farmstead, you might have to wrangle the colossal swarm of bees terrorizing the grounds of a meadery, and in the process learn about the local booze market. If you wander onto a remote bluff, you might advance a side quest that veers from a silly vignette into a meditation on your party’s role as armed servants of a monied lord in a nearly lawless frontier.

And if your characters appreciate a natural formation, they might endear themselves to you with a flash of overwhelming winsomeness. “This hill smells of crisp apples and fresh figs,” said my otherwise stoic frontman, as we approached a knolly patch of land. What a transportive world Banquet for Fools crafts, where, after countless memorable feats of daring—after saving entire communities, slaying mythical creatures, and awakening old gods—the scent of fruit yet lingers.

This game was reviewed with a code provided by Hannah and Joseph Games.