The Scroll Of Taiwu Review Summary

Despite great optimization and engaging combat, the anti-human UI, frequent bugs, crashes, and poor onboarding mar an otherwise rich addictive experience.

Rich and addictive gameplay: Multiple reviewers highlight the game's plentiful systems, depth, and fun factor, making it a highly enjoyable and addictive experience worth trying.

Unique and engaging combat: Combat is frequently noted for its unique, interesting, and innovative mechanics, along with engaging build variety that allows for strategic depth.

Developer dedication appreciated: Reviewers respect the developer's eight-year commitment and sincerity, acknowledging the hard work and persistence that went into finishing the game.

Great optimizations and UI: The official version features significant optimizations, a revamped UI with animated portraits, and comfortable interactions that improve the overall experience.

Best-in-class Wuxia immersion: Frequently praised as a top-tier Wuxia game, the title delivers a fully immersive world with vivid characters and compelling role-play elements.

UI is terrible and anti-human: Players criticize the new UI for being cluttered, unintuitive, and difficult to navigate. Many describe it as anti-human, with oversized icons, nested menus, and poor visual hierarchy that causes eye strain.

Frequent bugs and crashes persist: Frequent bugs, crashes, and red text errors persist even after the official release. These issues affect monthly progression, require restarts, and include save corruption, indicating poor stability.

Poor new player onboarding and tutorials: New players find the tutorial and guidance insufficient, making it hard to learn basic mechanics. The difficulty spike after the tutorial compounds this issue.

Save corruption and lack of manual saves: Save files often become corrupted with no manual save or cloud save options. This leads to significant progress loss, especially given the time investment required.

Game regressed from early access: Many longtime players feel the game has regressed from early access, with worse UI, no new content, and removed features. This is seen as a disappointing outcome after eight years.

Deep turn-based combat: The combat system is turn-based with unique mechanics such as a damage marking system, combo builds, and shadow puppet style presentation. While some find it simple, others highlight creative boss fights and skill resource management, making it a central feature.

Core village management: Village building and management is a core mechanic that impacts long-term resource generation and progression. Players oversee building placement, villager roles, and resource production, linking it directly to character strength and survival.

Cricket fighting minigame: A cricket catching and fighting minigame is a prominent side activity, but many players find it boring and repetitive. It is also tied to progression, with some feeling it is overused as a primary advancement method.

Multiple faction systems: The game features multiple sects with distinct martial arts, reputations, and storyline quests. Players can learn faction-specific skills and access unique narrative paths, making faction management a deep strategic layer.

Sword tomb boss gauntlet: Sword tomb progression is a key gating mechanic where players must defeat a series of bosses to unlock power and story progression. Early bosses are very difficult, but stat growth makes later encounters easier, creating a power curve.

Red text errors and crashes: Multiple players report red text errors and Unity error logs, often accompanied by crashes. Some users experienced over a dozen error messages during a session.

Poor optimization and lag: The game suffers from general optimization problems, including lag, stuttering, and poor performance. Some players find the game unplayable due to these issues.

Slow monthly progression: Monthly advancement in later years leads to slow save times and very slow monthly loading. Some areas cause crashes during the monthly tick.

Startup and access issues: The game became unopenable on a specific date, and on fresh install, bugs prevented clicking the start game button. File verification was required to launch.

UI lag and save freeze: UI lag is present, and autosave can freeze, simulating a game crash. The loading screen is also prone to potential crashes.

Overall negative consensus: Majority of feedback is negative, centered on bugs, UI, time investment, and developer neglect.

Positive for system depth: Positive reviewers appreciate the deep, complex, and unique experience, often despite flaws.

Wait for bug fixes: A significant portion of reviewers advise waiting for bug fixes and improvements before purchasing the game.

Not for sandbox/exploration: The game fails to satisfy players expecting sandbox, base-building, open-world interaction, or roleplaying.

UI issues cause negativity: Multiple reviewers tie their negative rating to UI issues and lack of fixes, promising to change only if UI is improved or reverted.

Community fair range: $20.00 - $35.00.

Game completion: 200.0h.

Story completion: 108.0h.

Players who push through a steep, poorly-guided 2–3 hour onboarding reach a fun anchor in cricket catching and village management, but many quit before that point due to high friction and complexity.

Reported time to anchor: 2h 30m.

Friction: Steep learning curve; Poor UI and menu responsiveness; Weak or missing in-game guidance; High grind and repetitive systems; Frequent bugs and crashes at mid-late game; Translation issues for English speakers.

Unlock drivers: Watching external guides or videos; Learning cricket catching and dueling; Understanding the cooking and trading economy; Reaching and managing Taiwu village; Shifting mindset from single-character to lineage management; Using mods to reduce grind and improve UI.

Lost Newcomer: Tentative, relies on external guides, easily frustrated by opaque systems. Motivation: Exploration and discovery of a complex RPG. Stance: no buy.

Disillusioned Veteran: Deep system mastery, values build optimization and legacy content. Motivation: Nostalgia for EA-era innovation and hope for completion. Stance: no buy.

Tolerant Enthusiast: Methodical, enjoys theory-crafting and long-term investment. Motivation: System depth and emergent storytelling. Stance: sale.

Performance across all hardware cohorts is predominantly negative, with severe crashes, freezes, and optimization issues reported even on high-end systems. Only the highest-VRAM and RAM cohorts show a mixed picture, but still suffer from notable bugs and poor user experience.

Windows 8-11GB VRAM: negative. Most reports describe crashes, freezes, and instability, with only a few recommending the game despite acknowledged performance issues.

Windows 12-15GB VRAM / 16-31GB RAM: negative. Overwhelmingly negative with frequent mentions of poor optimization, stuttering, long load times, UI lag, and crashes.

Windows <8GB VRAM / <16GB RAM: negative. All reports are negative, citing crashes, bugs, poor optimization, and inability to start or progress.

Steam Deck: The game suffers from severe stability issues including frequent crashes and red text errors, especially after updates or with mods. UI text is too small and cannot be scaled, making it difficult to read on Steam Deck. Performance is poor with long load times and lag. Steam Deck support is explicitly requested but currently lacking.

Linux and Proton: The native Linux version generally works well, with only one user reporting random locking issues. No evidence of severe breakage on Linux or Proton.

Monetization: User feedback indicates the game is a one-time buy with no microtransactions, free updates, and only a small paid DLC for a gameplay feature. While some reviews dislike the paid gameplay DLC, the majority confirm the absence of predatory monetization or in-app purchases. Base game development frustration is misdirected as price complaints, not evidence of greed.

Mod reliance: The game is heavily reliant on mods to fix a fundamentally broken UI, provide basic functionality, and work around bugs, but there is no widespread evidence of the game being unplayable on startup without mods. The complaints center on poor design choices rather than critical technical failures.

External guides: The majority of feedback centers on an overwhelming learning curve and poor UI, forcing near-constant reliance on external guides and the in-game encyclopedia. While the built-in wiki is appreciated, it fails to replace proper tutorials. Bugs and technical issues add to the frustration, especially for new players.

Request for Brazilian Portuguese: Players are requesting official Brazilian Portuguese language support, indicating a significant untapped player base. Adding this localization could improve accessibility and player satisfaction in South America.

Sexualized DLC content concerns: Some players object to the inclusion of sexualized content in downloadable content, considering it inappropriate. This feedback reflects a desire for the game to maintain a more neutral or family-friendly tone.