Bring back the Order’s report

Drova is a free role-playing video game wherein you must retrieve a report as you make your way deep within an unknown land. Developed by Just2d, this indie game has you playing as a novice member of an organization, who must journey across a deadly place in order to fulfill his mission. This 2D single-player pixelated RPG features an interesting 360° combat in an isometric world and versatile fighting mechanics that requires strategy and skill.

Welcome to Draheim

The story of Drova revolves around you, a novice of the mysterious Order of the Red Tower. For your first mission, you are instructed to venture into the Forest of Thara to meet up with a fellow Order member. However, upon discovering that your senior has gone missing, you will now have to face the dangers of this unknown area to find him—as well as steer clear of the local ruling faction, who dislikes your organization.

Exploration is easy enough as you simply have to use the WASD keys to move and your mouse to look around. Moving towards the direction of your cursor will make you jog while moving away from it will make you walk backwards. This also plays into combat, as you’ll attack in the direction you’re facing and dodge backwards from that direction. You can equip two sets of weapons and freely switch between them with the Q key.

Left-click to attack and right-click to block. Different weapons do different actions when you use a charged attack, which requires holding the left mouse button. Likewise, combos require different rhythms when left-clicking. However, to even start using your weapons, you need to press the R key to unsheath them—if you don’t, you can only interact with objects and NPCs. Mastering the combat mechanics is key to surviving and furthering your quests.

Watch your back

All in all, Drova is an interesting game inspired by old-school titles. Everything in here feels like a proper RPG adventure—even if the story can feel flat at times due to the writing and lack of unique character sprite animations. However, while the plot isn’t really impressive, the exploration and combat elements make up for this and show that this game can still be polished with more configurable settings and other nice features.