As you might expect before we dive into the details about Siralim 3’s gameplay systems, we should talk about the story and the game’s characters first. At the end of this post, I’ll also talk about a pretty big change coming to the way the game “feels” when you play it. Let’s get started!

The Story

Although the game is called Siralim 3, you won’t be ruling over Siralim this time around. Instead, you’ll take charge of the kingdom of Nex, one of Siralim’s closest allies. You see, as you might have noticed in Siralim 2, the king was kind of an asshole. Those bosses he mercilessly slaughtered were simply trying to protect the world from his mad ideals. His people, including his most trusted friends, were loyal to him only out of fear. But after a while, bullying his own kingdom wasn’t satisfying anymore. He decided to attack and invade other kingdoms, not caring whether they were friend or foe. Countless kingdoms succumbed to the king of Siralim’s wrath, and as it turns out, Nex is the only remaining kingdom in Rodia that hasn’t been completely annihilated. But the hour of war is now upon us in Nex, and we must rally our people to try to fend off the attack.

You’ll start the game in Nex, which is under attack by a preliminary force of Siralim’s army. While the people of Nex are quite familiar with summoning and using creatures in small-scale battles, a century of relative peace has left your kingdom with its guard down. Very few of your people will survive the attack, and even if you manage to fend off the invaders, re-building your castle requires time that you don’t have to spare. If you manage to repel the attack, waiting around for recovery is not an option. You need to take the battle to Siralim and destroy the king and his army once and for all.

Even the gods no longer believe in the king of Siralim, and they regret placing trust in him to use the Nether Orbs for good rather than evil. As you might have expected, they’ve come to you to help Nex overcome this war. They will serve a much larger role in this game than they did in Siralim 2, and their personalities are now a lot more fleshed-out and interesting.

Sidenote: if you choose to be a queen in Siralim 3, the antagonist will be the queen of Siralim instead of the king.

NPCs and Castle Upgrades

Well, spoiler alert: most of the people of Nex will die within the first 10 minutes of the game. You had a blacksmith, but he was beheaded. The tavernkeeper was eaten alive by horrible Nether Creatures. And the enchanter? Well, you don’t want to know what happened to her.

In previous Siralim games, you could unlock these NPCs and other features by completing castle upgrades. However, that isn’t how it works in Siralim 3. Instead, you’ll meet and recruit these people during your travels as you seek out a way to destroy Siralim. Some of these people simply might be looking for a kingdom to join, while others might be under attack or give you a task to complete in exchange for their undying loyalty. Others might even be defectors from Siralim.

From a gameplay perspective, I think this will make the game flow a lot more smoothly. The castle upgrade system in previous Siralim games presented an illusion of choice; after all, when would you not want an enchanter in your kingdom? Aside from that, rituals made this system feel even more cumbersome, so those are not in Siralim 3 at all. Now, you’ll simply unlock these NPCs as you progress through the game’s storyline. After moving in to Nex, many of these NPCs will have side quests for you which will unlock even more of their potential. For example, the blacksmith will give you quests that, upon completion, unlock new artifacts for him to craft.

A Classic Game

In some ways, Siralim and Siralim 2’s progression feels kind of cheap. For the most part, you and your creatures leveled up every battle or two, and while resources may have been scarce early on in the game, you probably had so many later on that you didn’t know what to do with all of them. Aside from that, the levels of your creatures didn’t seem to matter that much – a level 300 creature could fare pretty well against a level 350 creature.

In Siralim 3, leveling up will take a bit longer than before. Don’t worry, the pacing of the game will remain the same – I’m not going to make it more of a grind or anything, but I want each experience level to have more of an impact on your successes and failures than in previous games. Aside from that, creatures will gain stats exponentially when they level up. For example, in Siralim 2, each level simply granted a creature +20% to all of its base stats. In Siralim 3, each level grants a creature +20% to all its base stats as it did before, plus an additional amount equal to a function of its level. With the help of these changes, leveling up should feel a lot more rewarding and impactful.

You’ll also find that the resource system is more balanced than before. Power Balance has been removed from the game, so there’s no need to worry about that anymore. In addition, Power is now considered a normal resource just like Brimstone, Crystal, Essence, and Granite. Each resource will still be used for different things, and I am trying to make sure that players value all resources equally.

Another major change is how the death penalty is handled. In Siralim 1, you lost a percentage of your total resources when your party was wiped out. I don’t really like that since it had a tendency to increase the game’s difficulty simply because you died. That feels really inconsistent to me. That’s why in Siralim 2, the penalty for dying was a loss of Power Balance. But not only is Power Balance not in Siralim 3, it also caused players a lot of frustration because Power Balance was so tedious to maintain. The worst part about both of these death penalties is that because of the way the math works out, these penalties either annoyed players or players simply didn’t care about them at all, so they were happy to recklessly charge into a realm without considering the consequences of death.

Instead, here’s how the death penalty works in Siralim 3: every item you acquire in a realm (aside from resources) will be added to a “Pending” category in your inventory because they’re all tainted by Siralim’s corruption. These items cannot be used while they’re “pending”. After you find the Teleportation Shrine and teleport to a new realm or back to Nex, the Teleportation Shrine will dispel the corruption from these items so you can add them to your inventory. If you die in battle, the items will be lost forever. This death penalty will add a bit of tension to the game because if you find an extremely rare item a realm, there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to keep it if you die in battle. And since enemies now continuously spawn in realms, you can’t try to cheat the system by clearing out all the enemies and then opening up the treasure chests. This death penalty only applies to realms past a depth of 10. Huge thanks to Umaro on our forums for this idea!

What do you think of Siralim 3 so far? Are you excited? As always, if you have any suggestions for the game or want to talk about this post, please leave a comment here or check out our forums!