Many will remember Baldur's Gate, or if your RPG-senses are tingling you may have recently purchased similar title Divinity: Original Sin, but one of the games that took the isometric top-down traits of everyone's favourite hack, slash n' looter was The Bard's Tale - a solid romp through a fantastical setting with a wicked sense of humour to boot. If the PS2's port of Baldurs was your first taste of the genre and you were still left marvelling at just how much fun raiding keeps and dungeons whilst staring at pools of water could be (remember the ripples?), The Bards dog-accompanying Tale ticked all the right boxes. It wasn't just the infectiously-simple combat either, as in a move that would later make Davey Wreden's fourth wall-shattering The Stanley Parable so appealing, The Bard was constantly being accosted and commented upon by an omniscient Narrator, who would frequently chime in with his own thoughts on what was going on - only for Bard himself to bite back. Over the years it's faded into relative obscurity - potentially due to the fact that developers InXile's most well known effort besides is the spectacularly average Hunted: The Demon's Forge, but all the same if there was a diamond in the rough from an underrated studio, it's this.
