The spider's legs make this dry clicking sound when they hit the dirt, like someone tapping chopsticks on a table. I kept dying to the same giant spider near the starting forest because I was too busy listening to that noise instead of watching my health bar. Billy's Quest doesn't give a shit about you. It drops you in this huge open world with wolves that circle you, orcs that swing before you even see them, and spiders that poison you while you're still figuring out which button attacks. The combat is real time, so you're just mashing and running and hoping your sword connects before their teeth do.

The loot system is where it gets its hooks in. You kill a wolf, it drops a rusty dagger. You kill ten wolves, maybe one drops a leather chest piece that's slightly less garbage than what you have. Then you see a cave, go inside, find a chest with a steel sword that glows blue when you swing it. That feeling, that little dopamine hit, that's the whole game. I spent way too long farming orcs for a helmet that looked cool but had worse stats than my current one. The tutorial is buggy as hell, there's a fade to black part that sometimes just doesn't fade back, and the inventory screen feels like it was designed by someone who hates you. But the world is big, genuinely big, with hidden paths and random encounters that make you feel like you're actually exploring instead of following a dotted line.

I wish the armor actually showed on your character. It doesn't. You pick up this badass golden plate and your little sprite still looks the same. That bugs me more than it should. The monster variety is decent, wolves and orcs and spiders and some other things I won't spoil, but they all kind of fight the same way. Run at you, swing, die. The real enemy is the camera, which sometimes decides to show you a nice view of a tree while an orc is turning your skull into paste. Still, I kept playing. Kept dying. Kept clicking on that spider just to hear its legs again.