Heritage: an auto battler that cares about its writing and neglects everything on screen

Let us say it up front, because it is the first thing you see: Heritage is another auto battler without polished animation and with poor visual dressing. You sense some effort to avoid the completely generic, a wuxia theme with animals rather than the umpteenth fantasy bestiary, but it stays dry to look at.

The genre has this peculiarity that it can still work, because the pleasure comes from elsewhere. Provided what sits underneath is rich. And here, credit where it is due, the studio has done the work.

A whole life, year by year

The structure is more interesting than the genre average. You choose your name and your animal body, each form already bending the course of your life, with a Birth Bonus that sets your build from year zero. More than fifteen birth choices are announced.

From there the run progresses year by year, and each year presents three Scrolls. Each represents a concrete decision: training your body, studying techniques, embracing risk, following a philosophy, entering conflict. A scroll can grant attributes, percentages, gold, healing, equipment, unlocks, or trigger a battle that changes everything. The studio announces more than a hundred and sixty of them, each with its own text.

This is where the game finds its identity: it is not only about stacking bonuses but about telling a life built over decades, with its rises and its falls. Growing steadily or chasing immediate power is presented as the real trade-off, and it is a narrative angle few auto battlers attempt.

The rest is raw material in quantity: over a hundred and forty skills, more than thirty pieces of equipment, and above all ten sects to join, each with its philosophy, bonuses and routes, changing which scrolls appear and how your life unfolds. The promise is clear: no ready-made build, only the one life allowed you to construct.

The provisional verdict

The usual ratio is therefore inverted. Here the depth sits on the side of text and systems, the poverty on the side of the image. For a genre where you watch your units fight by themselves, that is a real handicap: the spectacle is part of the reward, and when there is no spectacle, what remains is numbers going up.

To be seen, then, whether the density of the scrolls compensates for the dryness of the staging across dozens of runs. The game has just launched, with no user reviews, which explains the absence of a score. It is available in French, which matters a great deal for a game this wordy.