The Lonesome Guild review – fighting for friendship

Life Is Strange creator Don’t Nod present a new cosy game that tackles serious social issues via some gorgeous looking action RPG battles.

French publisher Don’t Nod have an enviable reputation for releasing quality video games. Quite a few of them are made in-house, and while they’re most famous for the first two Life Is Strange games, with their branching narratives and fascinating blend of authentic characters and supernatural occurrences, there’s a lot more to them than that. Their first title, Remember Me may have been a little divisive, but mysterious climbing game Jusant is wonderful, and Banishers: Ghosts Of New Eden is both polished and unusually poignant.

Don’t Nod’s latest, 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 by being absolutely nothing like any other game they’ve released. It’s an action role-playing game about a party of animal adventurers who set out to try and stop a crimson mist from taking over their land.

The mist contains dangerously concentrated levels of loneliness, which as its name suggests, is a constant theme of the game, since its protagonists and the solitary ghost that accompanies them, have all suffered from it at one time or another. Together they feel a little better and Tiny Bull have taken pains to incorporate the theme into the game’s systems, as well as its plot.

As you fight battles and level up, gaining experience is only half the process. The other is earning relationship points (RP), without which you can’t spend experience in its skill trees. RP is awarded through conversation with your companions. Choose a response that resonates and you can earn a point or two, letting you acquire further skills.

You also earn RP by completing side and main quests, complementing the experience you gain from fighting, so the two increase hand in hand as you progress. You’ll find the choices you make in what to say will tend to appeal to one of your animal buddies more than the others, making it useful to vary your approach, even if it’s not really how you’d role-play it if left to your own devices.

It makes RP quite unpredictable in the way it’s meted out and leaves some companions under-levelled at times. It eventually evens out as you earn more from quest completions, but the other reason it doesn’t matter all that much is that while it’s nice gaining extra skills, hit points, and damage, it rarely feels essential given the ease with which you win most battles.

Combat is fought in typical action role-playing fashion, but with extremely simple controls. A single attack and dodge button is all you get, with fights’ interest derived from special moves, which require landing attacks to fill a power bar. You can also take advantage of the fact that your friend, Ghost, inhabits different characters as they fight. As you’re pummelling enemies with one party member, you’ll regularly get a message from another one encouraging you to switch.

When you do, they get enhanced damage for a few seconds, before Ghost moves on to someone else, and the process continues. Ghost also has a fast-charging energy bar, and can unleash a powerful attack of his own, but it’s unusual to feel too much pressure during bouts as high enemies clearly telegraph their attacks, making it straightforward to dodge them, and it’s only really bosses that present any kind of 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 party – getting one or more to pull and hold levers, while the others dash through a now open gate, before providing the same service for their companions. The loot you earn is generally armour or magic items, but none of it makes a perceptible difference to the flow of battle.

Exploration is similarly limited. Levels are simply designed and viewed from a fixed isometric view, and while there is a map, you can only look at it in certain locations. The rest of the time you’re left to wander, although given how uncomplicated and essentially linear it is that’s rarely an issue. When the path does bifurcate, it usually reunites with the one you would have been on moments latery, or proves to be a cul-de-sac with a chest at the end of it.

A bigger problem is the creeping sensation that it’s all a bit too straightforward. If battles are easy, exploration linear, puzzles obvious, and loot largely redundant, you’re only left with the story, and since most conversations are passive – when you do have a choice it’s only ever binary – The Lonesome Guild can feel a little basic.

That impression of oversimplification extends to the text-only dialogue, which is so direct and on the nose it can feel a bit like reading a children’s book. Its themes of loneliness and friendship are undoubtedly central to the era we’re living through, but when they’re dealt with in such obvious terms, it doesn’t really add much to the discussion.

The explanation for this apparent over simplicity may well be that The Lonesome Guild is made for younger players. It’s highly polished and has a charming art style, which is more than can be said for a great many children’s games, and If that is the case it would explain the forgiving difficulty and lack of nuance in its script. Misleadingly, it’s marketed as a cosy game, but this this is one title adult gamers may want to leave for their children or younger siblings.

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

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