It's twenty years after your village fled the kingdom and took refuge in Darkwood. You always knew that these woods hold dark secrets but now you start to feel their evil on your own skin. Horrible things are happening. You discover fragments of the woods dark history and come to the conclusion that you have to leave your home. You know in your heart that once you step out of the protection of the place where you grown up, nothing will be the same. You have to face a world that's in chaos. A world without laws. Nevertheless you feel something else too. You feel freedom. A completely new world awaits you to explore it, but the feeling quickly turns into guilt. There are people in Darkwood who are counting on your help. You are their last hope.

Balrum is an old-school, hybrid turn-based, open world indie RPG with deep tactical combat. Explore a huge living fantasy world with dozens of side quests next to an epic main quest. In addition to traditional RPG features Balrum has deep crafting which allows the player to craft their own custom items. Balrum also features farming your own crops, building your home, and survival mechanics complemented by the game's main features. In Balrum you will have a faithful animal companion as your pet. Your pet is fully controllable and adds greatly to the complexity of the combat.

Patch 1.7 (01 March 2023)

• The game now uses the latest libraries to ensure the best compatibility with modern systems.
• Modernized the underlying sound system to better handle modern audio configurations.
• Added sound effects to various game elements. Like opening a cauldron or picking up certain items that had no sound effect previously.
• Added a new conversation for Dudley. (this conversation should help newcomers to the game).
• Added a new map marker to the Darkwood map. (needs new playthrough).
• Small increases to text size in certain UI elements. (e.g. XP gained).

---

Patch 1.6 (09 November 2018)

GUI:

• The buildable objects inside the Building panel are now sorted for ease of use.
• Right clicking on an Inventory tab now sorts the items in that tab based on name and value.
• UI elements won’t reposition themselves when minimising/alt- tabbing the game.

Engine:

• The renderer now supports water reflections and bloom effects. The bloom effect is disabled by default. You can enable it via the video options menu.
• The config.xml subsystem has been rewritten to be more compatible and efficient.
• Improved performance on 4K systems.
• Third party libraries have been updated to the latest versions.

Fixes:

• The marble hearth now costs the proper amount to build.
• Some buildable objects have been moved to a different Building tab for ease of use.
• All crafting tables have been renamed inside the Building panel to be more recognisable.
• The Leader of the Pack boss now properly triggers the rewards dialog. (this was a regression)

Typos:

• Basic text errors and logical errors have been fixed:
• files/dialogs/en/gui/afterrelease.xml
• files/dialogs/en/osric/packsandfires
• files/dialogs/en/neil/history
• files/dialogs/en/elestterr/elestterwelcome
• files/dialogs/en/orran/orranwelcome
• files/dialogs/en/bolt/boltifmage
• files/dialogs/en/barnabas/youoweleonard
• files/dialogs/en/helperdialogs/howtotaimanimals
• files/dialogs/en/fox/golems
• files/dialogs/en/walker/a_cape_of_a_warlock
• files/dialogs/en/rod/rodimlookingforwork
• files/dialogs/en/tina/tinamissingfriends
• files/dialogs/en/kotf/reddragonwelcome

---

Patch 1.55 (26 June 2018)

Features:

• New walls: We added a new type of wall to the building tab. These are brick walls and to build them you need to create bricks from clay.
• New material: Now you are able to dig up clay at the waterside.
• Bricks: Bricks can be made at a furnace from raw clay.
• New plantable foliage: We added a few new flowers to the building panel.
• New buildable furnitures: We added a few new buildable furnitures.
• Jones now teaches a few new buildable items.

Gameplay:

• Skillbooks now grant learning points if you already know the skill the book teaches. (the book will be removed on usage)
• Wizard spells do more average damage. The maximum damage of offensive spells are not changed, but the minimum damage has been increased.
• Easy difficulty: The enemy health reduction on easy difficulty has been increased. So enemies have slightly less health on easy difficulty.
• Durability: Durability decreases slower on easy difficulty.
• Pet recall is now enabled during combat.
• Young animals now stack in a single inventory slot.
• The fire damage reduction while it is raining has been reduced.
• Osric now sells more chickens.

GUI:

• The save/load panel now asks you if you really want to load a saved game. So accidental double clicking a save slot when wanting to save won’t load that slot.
• Some basic UI text has been altered to make things clearer.
• Some NPC world dialogs are now colored.
• Picklocking floating texts stay longer on the screen.

Fixes:

• Fixed the orientation logic for a few buildable furnitures.
• The Close Shot ability now properly indicates usability when there are no arrows left.
• Fixed a crash that could happen when teleporting to the safeplace during an item craft.
• In certain situations your pet did not autoattack. This should be fixed now.
• Sometimes when loading in a new map the system would dismiss your pet even when there was space around the player.

Engine:

• Updated the engine libraries.
• Initialization of the sound system has been changed to increase compatibility.

For translators:

• The after_release.xml has been changed.
• The gui_texts.xml has been changed.

---

Patch 1.5 (11 April 2018)

List of changes

• The game now uses a more modern windowing system.
• Much better fullscreen support.
• Much better HiDPI support.
• Better high refresh rate support. (120Hz+)
• Rewrote parts of the renderer (both modern and legacy):
• fewer draw calls
• smarter buffer handling
• optimized shaders
• fixed legacy warnings
• Rewrote the audio system.
• better handling of multiple sound effects
• optimized buffer handling
• Better support for special keyboards.
• Auto sharpen when zooming in. (both gameworld and GUI)
• Improved the sharpen shader (sharpening is crisper).
• Smoother framerate pacing.
• Changed resource management systems for better compatibility and speed.
• Updated libraries to latest versions.

Fixes:

• Fixed a rare lighting bug that affected certain light effects when drinking potions.
• Picking up player placed pet traps now have a sound effect.
• Fixed a bug that made the fireplace sound play twice.

Gameplay change:

• A certain green magical flame trap now does significantly more damage when activated.

---

Patch 1.31 (27 September 2017)

Fixes:

• When defeating the boss in the wolf's cave the player is now able to speak of this deed with the villagers.
• When smelting metals, only silver and iron critical crafts produce spotless metal bars.

---

Patch 1.3 (22 August 2017)

Fixes:

• No more slight illumination hiccup in the morning time.
• Piercing Arrow now does proper weapon damage + bonus damage.
• Remaining strings in the code are now editable. (XML)
• Trinkets with lighting effects now properly cancel themselves when swapping similar trinkets.
• Fixed issues related to the “really interesting” book.
• Modernised the filesystem. (this change should minimise the file corruption issues)
• Auto rebuild of the config.xml if something goes wrong.

For translators:

• The after_release.xml has been changed.

---

Patch 1.23 (09 June 2017)

Fixes:

• When an npc's talking panel had a lot of conversation options, scrolling trough them with the mouse wheel could caused problems.
• In rare occasions when multiple containers were open and item divides were issued, ability selection could end up selecting the wrong slot.
• The auto closing of multiple containers (when the player moved away from the containers) sometimes could cause a freeze.
• The game now detects if the desktop resolution is really high and warns the player of the possible DPI scaling issues.
• Minor character panel tooltip fixes.

Gameplay:

• Mana now regenerates every 4 turns instead of 5 turns.
• Added graphical effects to some repair/build interactions.

For translators:

• The "after_release.xml" was modified.

---

Patch 1.22 (19 December 2016)

• There were times when some of the shield abilities miscalculated cooldowns.
• The Piercing Arrow ability disregarded it's cooldown.
• Sometimes when deleting furniture while on the floors tab the system would not give back materials.
• Fixed a crash while deleting decals from walls next to doors.
• If you were really fast with your clicking, sometimes you were able to get duplicated materials back while deleting certain furnitures.
• The animation and sound while placing down berry bushes have been adjusted.
• The smelter sometimes had a crafting material icon when you loaded a game with a character who has no smelting skill immediately after playing with a character who has smelting skill.

---

Patch 1.21 (14 November 2016)

Small additions:

• ALT + click now puts materials inside crafting tables intelligently.
• Autosaves won't happen when the player is below 10% health.
• Cheat death now gives back more health.
• Fields no longer get diseased if they are properly tended too.
• Enabled numpad walk commands.
• Tutorial popup when your pet dies or gets automatically dismissed.
• Reduce Gore option is available in the options panel.
• Game saves now show the chosen difficulty.

Issues fixed by this patch:

• Fixed a rare issue when some sound effects could stuck in a loop.
• Sometimes certain bosses did not use some of their abilities as frequently as intended.
• Damage absorbed text now shows the proper amount of absorbed damage.
• Deep wounds ability cooldown now properly activates.
• Mirrored monsters cannot cause a 0 damage critical bleed effect any more.
• Disabled green cursor (usable) indicator on some unusable objects.
• Fixed a graphical glitch when some late game NPCs did not render their staffs.
• Mannequins now properly render their inventory outside of the safe place.
• Fixed the ambient sounds of the island map.
• Fixed the ambient sounds of the desert maps.
• The GUI scale slider sometimes had problems setting the value.
• Various small visual map changes.
• Removing weapons while chopping down trees sometimes caused a visual glitch.
• Fixed a rare player and pet collision problem.
• Fixed a visual glitch in the last cutscene.
• Fixed a color issue with the repair panel's equipped items list.
• Fixed a rare issue with cleaning dust from ancient lore papers.
• Fixed a few typos.
• Fixed a number of other small things. (text/button positions adjusted..etc)

For translators:

• Tent tooltips are now editable via the after_release.xml.

• Nightfall level “1” (dialogs/en/gui/spells.xml)

• There are numerous new lines in the after_release.xml.

• Changes were made in the gui_texts.xml. (difficulty texts, level up text, tutorialpet)

• Just a friendly reminder to everyone! If you installed translation mods inside the "en" folder you might experience problems (because the "files/dialogs/en" folder is the main text folder of the game and should not be overwritten). Supported translations should always install inside their own folder! (example: ru, de, ..etc) If you are experiencing issues with translation mods delete the "en" folder and run Verify / Repair in GOG Galaxy!

• Thank you all for your support and have a nice day!