Ledgerbound initially caught my attention with one of the most brazen ad campaigns I’ve seen in a while. It was a reel on Instagram, with each character talking about if you could… uh… crack them. That, coupled with the absolutely stellar voice acting, I had to absolutely check this one out. My curiosity got the better of me, what can I say?
So, what’s the concept of Ledgerbound? We play as Rayna Ashvale, an insurance representative for a company called Heroes United, an insurance company that represents famous heroes across the realm. Of course, we get told to, and I’m quoting directly here, to “f**k all that backstory stuff; we’ll work it out!” We’re not even two minutes into the story proper and it had me in stitches.
Our job is to look over insurance requests of dead Heroes, figure out how the Heroes die, and backtrack over the moves they took, to prove ultimately they could’ve won the fight that took their lives, and therefore prove negligence and deny their insurance payouts. It’s actually quite cruel, but you’re assured the shareholders love it. While investigating one such case, Rayna absorbs Elder Magic into herself and gains magical powers. Beset with a quest to help seal away an ancient awakened evil that not even the greatest heroes in the land could stop, we travel the land, picking up a cast of ever-growing quirky characters to fill out our party.
Ledgerbound is half tactical RPG, half comedic narrative sim. This means we spend half our time fighting in different scenarios with different goals, using a simple element system of fire, grass and water to spice up the combat. The other half of the time is spent on our downtime, where we can manage our parties’ inventories and talk to them, increasing our bonds with our favourites.
For me, this is where Ledgerbound truly shines through. It has a huge cast of voice actors, including the famous Matt Mercer voicing the Prince Avarice, a Myowan looking to prove he is the greatest hero ever to live, and Stephanie Kerbis, who voices my personal favourite Jazz, your HR representative that both takes her job very seriously and hates it with a passion. These characters all feel extremely three dimensional. They acted brilliantly and the writing compliments that.
If you forced Jazz to sit me down and at quill point, force me to pick something bad about the game, I’d perhaps mention that Ledgerbound does fall back on using violence or sexual themes mainly for shock value. It doesn’t detract from the writing quality, but sometimes a sexual innuendo is thrown in where one isn’t needed and can drag down the tone of a scene. It’s very few and far between however.
Towards the end of my play through, around fifteen hours in (yes, I could not put this down), unfortunately my save file stopped working and I was forced to play a new save. But I didn’t feel any annoyance at this one bit; this just means I can explore other friendships I didn’t commit to, and perfect all the fights. If anything, I’m almost happy this happened; this means I can experience this amazing game again. And you should too. I promise you will not regret it.
Ledgerbound is available now on PC.