The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep

Lore & Background

The game is set some two centuries after the original trilogy. The Church of the Sword, now the predominant religion in Caith, has become radically xenophobic, persecuting magic-users and non-humans such as dwarves, elves, and trow. The story begins with the execution of six people in Skara Brae, witnessed by the bard Melody. She meets another bard, Rabbie, who leads her through an escape tunnel to Skara Brae Below, where refugees have set up camps. The player can build a custom character and gradually grow a party of up to six members. The plot uncovers that a primordial evil named Yadris, allied with resurrected villains Mangar, Lagoth Zanta, and Tarjan, seeks to open a rift under Skara Brae. Bishop Henric is revealed to be under Yadris's influence and is slain as the party races to stop Yadris.

Reader's Guide

The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep is significant as a revival of a classic 1980s RPG series after decades of dormancy. Developed by inXile Entertainment, it was crowdfunded via Kickstarter in 2015, surpassing its $1.25 million target in 12 days. The game uses Unreal Engine 4 and photogrammetry for textures. Its Director's Cut, released in 2019, added new dungeons and quality-of-life features. Reception was mixed: critics praised its combat, puzzles, and music (including contributions from Julie Fowlis), but criticized technical issues, dated visuals, and repetitive mechanics. It received award nominations for Best Original Song and Best Sound Design at the 2019 G.A.N.G. Awards, and for Best Audio Design at The Independent Game Developers' Association Awards. The game's legacy lies in its attempt to honor the original trilogy while introducing modern crowdfunding and development techniques.

Did You Know?

• The game was crowdfunded via Kickstarter in June 2015, reaching its $1.25 million goal in 12 days.
• Scottish folk singer Julie Fowlis contributed to the game's music.
• The Director's Cut version was released on August 27, 2019, for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, macOS, and Linux.
• The game was nominated for 'Best Original Song' and 'Best Sound Design for an Indie Game' at the 2019 G.A.N.G. Awards.

The Long Road to a Fourth Entry

The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep represents the culmination of a franchise that, for over two decades, was widely regarded as a completed trilogy. After the first three titles were released between 1985 and 1988, a fourth installment was initially in development at Interplay Productions. However, when the studio parted ways with its publisher, rights complications forced the project to be abandoned and repurposed into an entirely unrelated title called Dragon Wars. For many years afterward, the series went dormant, and fans continued to refer to it simply as the Bard's Tale trilogy. That changed in 2015, when Brian Fargo's InXile Entertainment launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a true fourth entry. The project was successfully backed, and the game finally arrived in 2018, delivering the long-awaited continuation that the community had been waiting for since the late 1980s.

A New Threat in an Expanded World

Set roughly two hundred years after the events of the original trilogy, Barrows Deep introduces a primordial evil that threatens to break free from its ancient prison. The narrative takes place in and around Skara Brae, the same small country town that served as the setting for the first game, but the developers revealed that the settlement sits directly above the critical location where this ancient force is sealed. Rather than simply repeating the formula of confronting a single antagonist, the game substantially broadened and reinterpreted the lore established across the original three titles. The previous villains—Mangar, Lagoth Zanta, and the mad god Tarjan—became part of a much larger cosmological backdrop. By continuing the story while simultaneously recontextualizing what came before, InXile gave longtime players a richer, more interconnected fantasy world to explore while still honoring the foundational narratives that made the series iconic.

A Complete Gameplay Reimagining

One of the most notable aspects of Barrows Deep is how thoroughly it overhauled the gameplay mechanics that defined the original trilogy. The first three games were classic first-person dungeon crawlers built around turn-based combat, a style that became synonymous with the franchise in the mid-1980s. InXile chose to depart from that formula entirely, crafting an experience that is arguably closer in feel to the 2004 action role-playing title than to the turn-based originals. This shift placed the game in a different mechanical lineage within the franchise, prioritizing real-time engagement over the deliberate, grid-based encounters that characterized the early entries. The decision reflected a broader evolution in how the Bard's Tale universe was being interpreted during this era, as evidenced by the 2017 VR side-story The Mage's Tale, which also favored action-based spellcasting over turn-based systems. For players who grew up with the original trilogy, this represented a bold redefinition of what the series could be.

Catalyst for the Remastered Trilogy

Barrows Deep did not exist in isolation; it served as the creative engine behind the Bard's Tale Remastered Trilogy, released the same year in 2018. This spinoff project re-created the original three games for modern hardware, updating their graphics and user interfaces, fixing long-standing bugs, and adding various quality-of-life improvements that made the classic titles more accessible to contemporary players. Crucially, the remastered versions were also slightly expanded in content, with new material added to retroactively connect the earlier games' plots and settings to the broader world established in Barrows Deep. This ensured that the trilogy and its fourth entry felt like a cohesive narrative arc rather than disconnected artifacts. The project reinforced what developer Alex Santa Maria had already declared in 2018: that The Bard's Tale stood as one of the most classic franchises in PC gaming, and that its legacy deserved to be preserved and made available to new generations of players.