Esteem: Little Wolf Saga – A Howl-Worthy Adventure or a Lost Pup?

Esteem: The Little Wolf Saga

This game reminds me of an old-school top-down, turn-based RPG. I mean, that is what it is, but still, ah the good old days. There is even the hit action addition to the fighting, but we'll go over that later. 

Esteem came out on March 6th of 2025, developed by Ingami Studio. This is their only game. It was published by Dream Stories, who have published other games like Valledi a side-scroller game about a girl and her little drone, Envyus, a top-down RPG game, and quite a few others.

Esteem is listed as $9.99 on the Steam store. 

I also would like to thank the devs, who gave me the key through a program called Keymailer. 

The game

Esteem is about a little wolf named Laisa. I had no clue on how to pronounce her name, so in my frustrations I just called her lady. She woke up late, and while exploring, I somehow managed to make her go back to bed. You have to help someone pick plants from a garden and then go on to meet with who I would assume is the village elder. You learn about the town's crystal, and then chaos follows. At this point, you pretty much are on a journey. 

Now, before the chaos starts, you learn and earn different tools. An axe to cut wood and a pick to mine rocks. You can't just cut down any tree or rock, but the ones you can harvest are obvious. I have a bad habit of just collecting things because you just never know if you will need them. I also like to just walk into random houses because it's completely fine in any RPG game you play for some reason. Like, "Hello, neighbor, what are you doing/ what do you have in here?" You can also find random treasure chests, so that was a hunt everywhere to make sure I got all the items of this area thing. 

I had a few quests that I tried to follow. I have no idea where a flower was I was supposed to find I assume at this point it's somewhere else since I didn't find one anywhere in town. There were a few shops selling some items, and I managed to learn how to fish in a side extension of the town.

Combat

You have 4 meters: health, mana, experience, and esteem. I honestly have no idea what the esteem meter is for, but I have noticed it does go up and down. I'm not sure how it changes things I'm sure I might have missed something that told me what it was. There are quite a few pages of information that pop up to explain things, but I honestly don't remember anything explaining this. So it's something I'll have to look up and edit this section in the future as I do plan to play it further. 

Back to the combat, this is a turn-based game, and when you attack a monster, you have to press the right spot to get maximum damage. Not hitting it at all; you will, of course,, miss. While hitting it on the bar will do different degrees of damage. I'm pretty good with it and mostly hit in the perfect area. Thank you, Rhythm Games. Now, you don't see the monsters; they pop up old-school style, and you just randomly go into combat. I like that you can just grind and level up your person. There were many games where you felt stuck, as there were only so many enemies. 

I noticed that depending on the weapon you have changes the attack type. I had a basic attack, then got a ghost sword, and it was then an ice type. Laisa also has a healing spell, but it doesn't heal very much. I also noticed that you level pretty quickly and there is no, "you leveled up" notification or skills to chose. It's just set stats and things. 

There is a wide variety of monsters they are cute. I like the Sleepjaws; they look like little poofballs with teeth. 

More

So there are no armor slots, but there are 4 ring slots. In the stats menu, there is, of course, health, mana, and esteem, as mentioned before. But there is also damage, defense, magic power, vampirism, magic defense, speed, and luck. I have a lot of 0s in some stats. I also noticed the tutorials section is greyed out. You, of course, have other tabs like map, inventory, missions, options, and save in the menu section. 

I have lots of crafting materials, but I don't see how to craft anything. I did just get to a town so I'm going to assume by what is in the building that I was able to go into is that things need to be made in certain places/on certain workbenches.

Thoughts

I really like the game there is just a big glaring problem. It likes to crash during combat. My character would just keep slashing over and over, or it would just freeze, and nothing moved at all. So it really has hindered my progress. It does seem to have decent auto save functionality on top of being able to save it yourself. So I hadn't had to redo too much, but I feel I would have gotten farther in the game without the frustrations. There isn't a control or hotkey button in the options to see if there is anything. Plus, as I mentioned, the tutorials are greyed out, so it's not like anything you have already learned you can go back and recheck. 

Auto run works sometimes; sometimes, you have to restart it by pressing the run key. The view on the map button doesn't seem to work in missions. There was also an event that I had to trigger, and it took lots of searching for it to work. The game also opens up my Steam VR, and I don't think this game is VR at all, so that is weird.    

So, there are definitely some issues with the game, but all in all, I still really like it. they have patched the game a few times, so I would think there are still going to be more improvements and fixes to the game. If you don't care about the bugs, snag it now; if not, just wait until they fix stuff. I mean, the game is only $10. It's why I like Steam games so much versus, console games. 

The community reviews on Steam are all positive. Knuffybaer[GER] said, "Esteem - The Little Wolf Saga offers a successful combination of RPG and strategy elements. It offers good content despite its development phase." After giving a really lengthy review themselves, and also providing the review in another language. All the other reviews are in other languages as well. 

Content

As always, I ask you to take the time to let us know what you think of the game and if this is something you might check out for yourself. What are some other games you think I should play? Who knows? I might have already played it and just not written about it. 

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You can check out the first Let's Play, with more to come. So, make sure you go subscribe on youtube to keep up with the progression of the story!