Kyen and Bylina - classic-inspired RPGs on Android

[Niahak]

These are evidently inspired by Gurk (an early mobile game series that is largely unavailable - Gurk III is "visible" on the app store, but doesn't support Android 14).

Kyen: The Skeleton Amulet is effectively a free demo for Bylina: Lure of the Sorceress, which is $1. Android only, at least for now.

I don't see many mobile games focused on portrait mode, which is my preferred style by far... so I was pretty excited to see these. After I finished Kyen, I immediately bought Bylina.

Both are played via a mock "keyboard" in portrait mode, and mimic early CRPGs like Ultima. You can recruit two additional characters (expected party is Warrior/Archer/Wizard, although Bylina offers more diversity). Rerolling abounds, and there are certainly difficulty spikes in both games. Combat is early Ultima-style (reminds me most of Exodus NES), where there's a fair starting distance between your party and most enemies. Level 1 fighting is especially high-risk because HP pools are so low, but itemization is pretty fun and there's a fair bit of story involved. Some grinding for sure, although levels are infrequent. At levels you get random HP/SP and attribute gains and can reroll up to twice. Bylina has lots of eastern-European naming conventions and mythological creatures, though I can't attest to all of them being real mythology versus invented.

I can't really put a time to beat on either of these, but Bylina is at least 3x as long as Kyen (to be fair though, I learned a fair bit in Kyen that I used to my advantage in Bylina). Kyen is at least a few hours.

An early vague hint for Kyen:

Spoiler

There are two dungeons available from the town, and the harder one to find is probably easier to start with

[Kong Wen]

These look rad! My question with any retro game that looks like this is always... how well is it executed? If you're vouching for it, I trust it enough to give it a try. Thanks for posting!

[Niahak]

These look rad! My question with any retro game that looks like this is always... how well is it executed? If you're vouching for it, I trust it enough to give it a try. Thanks for posting!

It's not quite as hard as I would expect from its inspiration, but more difficult than you'd expect from a mobile game. A bit of grinding and rerolling are expected, and you need to be careful about movement in battles (ranged attacks are good, especially early). It does give much less guidance than most modern mobile games, but is never so vague that you need to take notes. There is a mapping feature.

It doesn't have permadeath, but revival can only happen in town so that may be something to watch out for.

For party composition, if you want to have two of anything in your party (mage, archer, warrior) make sure that class is the character you're rolling. There are subclasses of each - in Kyen they mostly affect base stat rolls, but they do get access to different abilities later.

The first 15-20 minutes of Kyen are likely to give you a very good idea of what to expect from the rest of it, although you can expect it to get a bit easier after your first level up.

Bylina gave me a very unexpected moment from an RPG when one of my party members left for personal reasons related to a decision I made. I was caught off guard enough that I wasn't even mad.