Our Last Crusade Or The Rise Of A New World

What This Game Actually Is and Whether You Should Play It

Our Last Crusade is a top-down action roguelite from 2023 that puts you in armor made of saints. You play as a nameless knight wandering through a decaying fantasy world, collecting holy relics and piecing together what went wrong. The combat is tight but brutal. One mistake usually means death, so every run feels like a learning session rather than a grind. The game is relatively low-key and hasn't gotten the same attention as bigger roguelikes, which is both a blessing and a curse. The developer published it on Steam as an early access title and refined it over the course of about a year before the full launch. The core loop is standard roguelite territory: enter a run, fight through waves of enemies, grab randomized upgrades, die or win, repeat. What makes it slightly different is the relic system. Instead of generic skill trees, you collect actual story fragments tied to each saint relic, and they slowly reveal the world's backstory as you play. I found that approach actually works better than most narrative-heavy games because it doesn't force cutscenes on you. If you want to get it, it's available on Steam. Just search for the full title and grab it. There's no launcher wrapper or always-online requirement beyond the usual Steam DRM. On Epic Games Store it should be listed under the same name.

Setting Up Without Losing Your Mind

The game runs on a PC with modest specs, but there are a few things worth knowing before you install. Minimum requirements are around a dual-core CPU and 4GB RAM, but I'd recommend 8GB if you want stable frame rates during heavier combat scenes with lots of projectiles on screen. The game supports controller input natively, and keyboard plus mouse works fine too. I played mostly on a Xbox controller, and the vibration feedback for getting hit is surprisingly useful for learning enemy patterns without looking at the health bar. One configuration file you should check is in the standard Steam userdata folder. The game doesn't expose much in its settings menu, but you can tweak resolution scaling and some render options through the config file if the in-game options aren't enough. I bumped my render scale to 150 percent on a 1080p monitor because the UI elements were a bit small for comfortable reading during fast fights.

How the Combat Actually Works

Combat centers on three actions: light attack, heavy attack, and dodge. There's no blocking in the traditional sense. You dodge through attacks with brief invincibility frames, which means positioning matters more than waiting for an opening. Each saint relic you collect adds a new ability or modifies an existing one. Some relics grant ranged options, others change your movement, and a few alter how your heavy attack functions entirely. The counter-intuitive part most beginners miss is that spamming light attacks is worse than holding back and reading enemy telegraphs. Every enemy has a visible windup before their heavier strikes, and if you're too busy clicking rapidly you'll eat damage constantly. I spent my first few runs dying because I was treating it like a hack and slash instead of a rhythm-based dodge game. The fix was simple: I stopped attacking on the first pass and just learned when to move. Once I understood the timing, the combat opened up considerably.

The Relic System and Build Diversity

You'll encounter roughly twenty to thirty relics across different runs, each tied to a specific saint. Some are passive bonuses, some are active abilities with cooldowns, and a few completely change your playstyle. For example, one relic lets you deposit collected souls at safe points to permanently upgrade stats, which shifts the game toward a more progressive build rather than pure run-based power spikes. Another relic gives you a summoned companion that draws aggro, which is essential for certain difficulty modes. Here's where people trip up: not every relic combo is balanced. I found that stacking two aggro-drawing relics together caused some enemies to become nearly impossible to engage because your companion and the relic effects pulled all enemy attention away from you at once. It sounds good on paper but in practice it creates situations where you can't land hits without intentionally breaking the aggro loop. The workaround I used was to pair aggro relics with AoE attacks so the enemies would hit each other while distracted. It's not elegant but it works.

What the Game Does Poorly

The boss fights are inconsistent. A few of them are well-designed with clear patterns and fair mechanics. Others feel like they rely on visual clutter and speed rather than pattern recognition. I had a run where I died to a boss fourteen times because the attack animations overlapped in a way that made it impossible to tell which move was coming next. The developer patched some of these issues post-launch, but a handful remain. If you hit a wall with a specific boss, the community has posted frame-by-frame analysis videos that break down the attack timings, and those are genuinely helpful. Another downside is the late-game content thinness. After clearing the main path, there's limited additional material beyond harder difficulty tiers and randomizer modes. If you're the type who wants fifty hours of content after beating a game once, this won't fill that gap. The replay value comes from trying different relic combinations, but even that loses momentum after about ten to fifteen runs. For the price point it's reasonable, just don't expect endless content.

Performance and Common Issues

On AMD graphics cards especially, some users report occasional stuttering in later areas with dense particle effects. The workaround is to cap your framerate to 60 and disable any vertical sync that conflicts. Running the game windowed at your native resolution also tends to be more stable than fullscreen exclusive mode on older hardware. I've seen the same stuttering reported on NVIDIA cards as well, though less frequently. Updating your GPU drivers before playing seems to help more than most people expect. There's also a known issue where saves can corrupt if you exit the game during a boss transition. The game autosaves at the start of each boss room, so as long as you're willing to retry from that checkpoint, you won't lose progress. Still, it's annoying enough that I started manually backing up my save folder every few sessions. The save location is straightforward and follows the standard Steam appdata path for the game's ID.

Final Thoughts on Our Last Crusade Or The Rise Of A New World

This is a solid roguelite for people who enjoy tight combat and don't mind shorter runs. The relic system adds genuine strategic depth, and the atmosphere holds up well. It's not the most polished game in the genre, and there are rough edges, but the core loop is strong enough that the flaws don't derail the experience. If you're looking for something to dip into for an hour or two at a time and want meaningful choices between runs, it's worth your money. If you need a deep narrative or massive replay variety, look elsewhere.