Venetica

Venetica is an action role-playing game. Players control its protagonist Scarlett in a third-person 3D world. The environment is partitioned in several maps with no true open world movement. Players on PC can use either keyboard and mouse or a gamepad to control Scarlett; on consoles only a gamepad can be used. The game uses a day and night cycle with each time of day lasting 15 minutes.

Players cannot customize the protagonist herself but the game offers an experience point based leveling system that awards skill points and attribute points with each level gained. Skill points allow Scarlett to learn new fighting or magical powers by interacting with certain non-player characters. Attribute points can be used to increase one of four basic attributes that correspond to in-game characteristics, namely "constitution" (health points), "wisdom" (mental energy), "strength" (amount of damage dealt with weapons) and "mental power" (amount of damage dealt with spells).

The story of Venetica takes place in a 16th-century styled world in and around Venice where Death is a physical being, who follows the instructions of a group known as Corpus. Every generation, Corpus must select the successor for Death. The game takes place after the council chooses a necromancer to control Death and he decides to bring complete death and destruction upon the world. This necromancer has immortalized himself through Death; thus, the current Death and Corpus cannot stop him. The player takes control of Scarlett, Death's daughter, who must cultivate and grow her powers to save her father and the world from the necromancer.

Scarlett is living in the small fictional village of San Pasquale near Venice with her lover, Benedict. The game begins with the village being attacked by assassins and Benedict dying in order to protect Scarlett. On the night after the attack, Death appears in her dreams and reveals that she, who thought herself an orphan, is actually his daughter, conceived shortly before he became Death, granting Scarlett many of Death's powers. He tells her that Victor, the Undead Archon, used a loophole in the rules that bind existence to cheat death and become nearly immortal.

Venetica was developed by Deck13, a small German developer with less than 40 employees which had previously mainly developed point-and-click adventure games, such as Ankh and Jack Keane. The game was first announced by publisher DTP Entertainment on 27 May 2008 with the release of story information and four screenshots. More features, such as the day and night cycle, were shown to the press in October 2008. In March 2009, the developer collaborated with German games magazine PC Games to give players the chance to name a weapon in the game complete with back story. On 21 April 2009, the winner was revealed to be "Chantori".

On 26 August 2009, publisher DTP Entertainment announced that the Windows version of Venetica had gone gold. Venetica was first released for the European market on 4 September 2009 for Microsoft Windows. In December 2009, Deck13 released a patch that significantly improved the game's graphics and level of detail as well as its performance and added a number of new features.

The game got "mixed or average reviews" for Windows, and "generally unfavorable reviews" for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 according to ranking aggregator Metacritic.

The graphical design of the game was generally found lacking and dated by reviewers. RPGamer called the setting "stunning" but limited their praise to the scenery, adding that up-close areas and characters look incorrect and that the game is marred with inconsistencies. GamesRadar+ called the experience of playing the game "dizzying", citing sharp light contrasts, erratic camera and too small subtitles, and opined that the graphics would have been considered terrible even on previous generation consoles like the PlayStation 2 or the GameCube. In his review for Bit-Tech, Chris Pickering agreed with these criticisms but pointed out that at times, such as the shimmering effect of certain weapons, the graphics are actually quite good. The graphics on the console versions were generally considered worse than for the PC version despite the game not using the full potential of the consoles.