The Lonesome Guild review – fighting for friendship

Life Is Strange creator Don’t Nod presents a new feel-good game that tackles serious social issues through some gorgeous-looking action RPG combat.

French publisher Don’t Nod has an enviable reputation for releasing quality video games. Quite a few of them are self-made, and while they’re best known for the first two Life Is Strange games, with their branching narratives and interesting mix of authentic characters and supernatural events, there’s more to it than that. Their first title Remember Me may have been a little divisive, but Jusant’s mysterious ascent game was excellent, and Banishers: Ghosts Of New Eden was subtle and deeply poignant.

Don’t Nod’s latest game, The Lonesome Guild, is made by Italian studio Tiny Bull and is consistent with their stable of titles both in its high production values, and in being completely unlike any other game they’ve released. This is an action role-playing game about a group of animal adventurers trying to stop the red mist from taking over their land.

The Mist contains a highly concentrated level of loneliness, which as the name suggests, is a constant theme of the game, as its protagonists and the reclusive ghosts accompanying them have all suffered from it. Together they feel a little better and Tiny Bull has taken great pains to incorporate those themes into the game’s systems, as well as the plot.

As you fight and level up, gaining experience is only half the process. The other is earning relationship points (RP), without which you can’t spend experience on his skill tree. RP is awarded through conversations with your friends. Choose the appropriate response and you may earn a point or two, so you can gain further skills.

You also earn RP by completing side and main missions, supplementing the experience you gain from fighting, so both increase as you progress. You’ll find that the choices you make in terms of what to say are likely to appeal more to one of your animal friends than another, so it’s useful to vary your approach, even if that’s not how you’d play the role if left to your own devices.

This makes RP unpredictable in how it is awarded and sometimes leaves some colleagues below level. This eventually evens out as you gain more from completing missions, but another reason why this doesn’t matter as much is because while gaining additional skills, hit points, and damage is nice, it rarely feels important considering the ease with which you win most battles.

Combat is fought in typical action role-playing game style, but with very simple controls. You only get one attack and dodge button, with combat interest coming from special moves, which require landing attacks to fill a power bar. You can also take advantage of the fact that your friends, Ghosts, inhabit different characters as they fight. When you attack an enemy with one party member, you will often receive messages from other party members encouraging you to switch.

When you do, they take increased damage for a few seconds, before the Ghost moves to someone else, and the process continues. The Ghost also has a quickly refillable energy bar, and can unleash its own powerful attacks, but it’s unusual to feel too much pressure during a fight as tall enemies clearly deliver their attacks, making it easy to dodge them, and only the bosses present any threat.

The rest of your time is spent exploring and solving puzzles. Many of the latter take the form of pattern matching, or lever and gate problems that require you to split your group – asking one or more to pull and hold a lever, while the others run through the now open gate, before providing the same service to their companions. The loot you obtain generally takes the form of armor or magic items, but neither of these make any real difference to the flow of combat.

Exploration is also limited. Levels are simply designed and viewed from a fixed isometric view, and although there is a map, you can only view it at certain locations. The rest of the time you’re left to wander, although considering how uncomplicated and linear it is, that’s rarely a problem. When the path forks in two, it will usually meet back up with the path you’ll be on a few moments later, or prove to be a dead end with a chest at the end.

The bigger problem is the feeling that everything is too easy. If the combat is easy, the exploration is linear, the puzzles are clear, and the loot is mostly redundant, all that remains is the story, and because most of the conversations are passive – when you have a choice, it’s just binary – The Lonesome Guild can feel a little basic.

The impression of oversimplification extends to the text-only dialogue, which is so direct and immediate that it feels like reading a children’s book. The themes of loneliness and friendship are undoubtedly important in the era we live in, but when they are handled in such clear terms, they don’t add much to the discussion.

An explanation for this simplicity may be that The Lonesome Guild is made for young players. It’s very polished and has a charming art style, which is more than can be said for many children’s games, and If so, this would explain the forgivable difficulties and lack of nuance in the script. Misleadingly, it’s marketed as a comfort game, but it’s one of those titles that adult gamers might want to leave for their kids or younger siblings.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £19.99
Publisher: Don’t Nod
Developer: Little Bull Studios
Release Date: October 23, 2025
Age Rating: 7

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