This guide is meant as a review for the people which might be interested in going for the completion of all of the game achievements. Being an achievement hunter myself and having already obtained this platinum, I will go over the game and its achievements, analyzing them to the best of my abilities.

Also it should be noted that this in not a comprehensive guide on HOW to obtain said achievements, since I think there is more that enough material online for basically all of the games I will cover, which will be able to help you gain the specific achievements you might still need. This guide will instead go over the game and will show you what you should expect while achievement hunting for this game.

One thing that should be clear to all readers is that this guide is a reflection of the game at the moment in which I am writing about it, so it might not be completely accurate if much time is passed as there might have been more updates released with adjustments and so on. The only thing I will try to always keep up to date will be eventual new achievements that might be released in the future. Of course keep particular attention to multiplayer-related achievements, since they might be affected by server closure or simply by drop in popularity of the game which might affect the easiness of which you might find the other people needed to obtain certain objectives. This of course might not pertain to the game in question since that's a common disclaimer I put on all my guides, so it’s just a warning.

Last thing, of course this will NOT be a spoiler free review, since the goal is to analyze what is necessary for the platinum it will be necessary at times to discuss the contents of the game. That said, it’s also not a full spoiler review, so when is not needed I will not spoil the contents of the game. For this reason you might want to avoid reading this review if you don’t want to risk any kind of spoiler to the game and maybe go back to it only after you’ve played your first run and are ready to hunt for the remaining achievements you might be missing.

Now, for the guide itself, it will be divided into four sections, the first one will be a brief general overview of the game and its achievements, the second will focus on the game itself and its pacing, the third will cover particularly difficult achievements to which you might want to put more focus compared to the rest, and the fourth will draw the conclusions based on the previous three analyses.

Bound by Flame includes a total of 41 achievements, all of which pertain to the base game, so you won’t have to buy any additional content to reach platinum. Out of the 41 achievements, 6 are unmissable and story-related, while of the 35 remaining, most are tied to different endings, secondary missions, ingame feats or different routes for your characters.

One thing that should be noted is the fact that one playthrough of the game is not enough to reach platinum. Although the difficulty-related achievements are retroactive and finishing the game in hard mode allows you to gain also the ones for the easy and normal difficulties and that the multiples endings can easily be achieved through savefile reload, the game includes also two different paths and four romances for your character, so you’ll have to replay the game at least twice to gain everything (also because the four possible romances are with two female and two male NPCs and that the game doesn’t include the option of a homosexual romance, so you’ll have to create a second PG with the opposite gender to your first).

Well, I’ll try to be as fair as possible to the game, but since I don’t think there is a particularly nice way to say what I’m going to say, I’ll just do it. The game is rough, like REALLY rough, I don’t mean to say that it’s bugged, unplayable or anything, since the game is TECHNICALLY functional, but you can feel since the first few minutes of gameplay that it definitely could’ve gained a lot if the developers would’ve postponed its release and kept working on it for a few months or something.

From the start it appears as one of those games which are not that polished, but that I think in a way or the other most of us have encountered one of these kind of games (maybe a relative of yours gifted it to you after buying it from the 90% discount pile at the nearby store when you were a kid of whatever), so here there’s nothing new. But things gets worse as you play it, in the end I have to say that this is not the kind of product that would’ve passed through a quality check control done by a competent individual.

Again, I feel sincerely bad saying this because I don’t want to offend or insult anyone which played a part into the making of this game. Especially because I’m not aware of the situation of the development team at the time or if they were rushed into the publishing of the product by some higher-up or something like that (I know that it is the same team which released a while ago Steelrising, so they have definitely shown to be capable of producing something praiseworthy), but I also have to be honest to the people which are reading this guide. Initially I was also in doubt as to if I should’ve even write this guide because I don’t really have much good to say about the game, but since I decided to write this type of guide for each and every game I get platinum, here it is.

If I have to say what’s the least forgivable thing about the whole game I’d say it’s the situation with the final boss. It doesn’t really matter in which mode you’re playing the game, since the difficulty spike when facing said boss is just ridiculous. Like on a scale going from 1 to 10 (where 1 is playing solitaire with just cards belonging to a single seed and 10 is something like Super Meat Boy), this game goes from a 3 of the easy mode, to a solid 7-7 ½ just when facing the final boss whatever the difficulty you’re in. (I also looked online to see if it was just me that was missing something obvious, or if there was a mechanic I somehow completely ignored which was needed for that fight and no, it wasn’t me). Fortunately there is a trick to completely cheese the final boss, but you have to be prepared for it, otherwise you’ll just be stuck in the final boss arena without the things you need for this method.

If I have to say something nice about the game is that the basic idea is nice (definitely not inspired or anything, but nice) and that there are points which hint at a deeper worldbuilding lore which can at times be fascinating. Unfortunately in the end none of those things deliver in any shape or form and they will be just left up in the air.

So this game is not a bad game because it’s just bad, in fact it has all the elements for being a nice game (not memorable, game-changing o whatever, but still a solid game), but unfortunately all of those elements in the end just fall short for one reason or another and while I don’t regret buying it (especially at the price I bought it during sales) or finishing it, I also don’t have basically any fond memories of it as it was simply frustrating most of the time. I know it doesn’t really makes sense to not regretting it, but still thoroughly disliking all the time spent on it, but hey I’m a complicated person. (Yeah, sure, let’s just go with complicated).

Luckily, the game by itself is not hard at all to completely finish and by that I mean that apart from completing the main story, there are not particularly hard extra challenges as most achievements are tied with things like killing certain enemies in a certain way, unlocking all of the abilities in a certain branch of your skill tree and so on.

The main problem is the fact that it not being a particularly fun game to play, especially the second time around, there are few achievements which will force you to replay some sections, some of which can be quite long. As I don’t think that this game has any particularly hard single achievement to get, I will go over different points, more than objectives, of which there are three.

The first one is tied to the completion of the main campaign and the achievements tied to it are “The One and Only Lord”, “Purifying Fire”, “Sacrifice”, “Hawk”, “Buffalo” and “Captain”. Like I’ve said before, the final boss of the game is a problem and represents by far the greatest difficulty spike of the whole experience, independently of how you decide to confront the game. These achievements are the only ones that actually require you to beat it. “The One and Only Lord” is the one directly tied to the defeat of the boss, “Purifying Fire” and “Sacrifice” are for the two different endings from which you’ll have to choose at the end of the game, while “Hawk”, “Buffalo” and “Captain” are the ones tied to the difficulty you’re playing with. All of the luckily can be achieved in one go, because the difficulty-related ones are retroactive so for completing the game in hard mode you’ll also gain the rest, while for the one tied to the ending you can always reload your save to just before making your choice and just choose again. Since you of course will have to actually finish the game at some point during you run, you can just go for them all at one and I suggest you wholeheartedly going for the trick which will allow you to defeat the final boss basically in one go (or almost), as I strongly believe that there is no actual reason to face him the classical way.

The second point is tied to the different paths your character will be able to chose from and there are two different things you’ll have to look at. The first one is tied to the actual storyline your character will follow (by storyline I don’t mean the progression of the ingame events which will always be the same, but if you’ll allow your character remain human or to fully embrace its demonic powers), while the second one is tied to which skill branch you’ll complete. The first one is tied to “Humanist” and “Unleash the Beast”, they are of course mutually exclusive and will be tied to certain ingame choices in a few focal points during the main story. Allowing the character to transform into a demon will maximize its power, so I suggest you to keep that path for the playthrough in which you will actually beat the final boss. There are also many guides online which will tell you to make a backup of you savefile just before the point in which you’ll first have to start making a choice and you can absolutely do that, but still the time you will save is not THAT massive as you will have to replay most of the content of the main campaign, so it doesn’t really matter what you’ll do in my opinion. The second one is tied to three different achievements with “Master Ranger”, “Master at Arms” and “Firestarter” were you’ll have to maximize the skill branch relative to you ranger skills, your warrior skills and you fire magic skills, though you can distribute your skill points without any kind of limitation, for each playthrough you won’t gain enough points to maximize two different skill branches, so you might want to save enough points to maximize one skill branch, save the game AND JUST THEN put all skill points into a branch, just to reload and do the same with the others (and this is intended for your easy playthrough because in the meantime you’ll have to face the game basically severely underleveled).

The third point is tied to the romances, there will be four different NPCs with which your character will be able to enter a romance. To do that you’ll have to finish all the related quests of the NPC, to which there is also a separate achievement for that, but you wont be able to romance more than one NPC per playthrough (so again, just reload savefiles), but you also won’t be able to romance an NPC of the same gender of your character so as I’ve said before you’ll have to make a second characters with the opposite gender to your first.

As I made clear more than enough times at this point, this is not a good game. Maybe it can still be enjoyed mildly (with the exception of the final boss) with a single casual playthrough, but if for whatever reason you want to subject yourself to the full experience of its 100% like I did, well I can assure you won’t risk experiencing said mild enjoyment.

The best advice I can give you in that case is: before starting to play, plan everything of your almost two full playthroughs as specifically as you can. Watch the details of every achievement that’s not extremely straightforward (especially those I cover in the previous section) and decide from the start which one of those you’ll go for in each of those two runs as to reduce to the minimum the ingame hours you’ll spend playing it.

In terms of time completion, it depends entirely of the way you will decide to approach the platinum. If you decide to cut every corner possible (like I honestly suggest you should do), you might even take 35 to 40 hours if not less. If instead you decide to maybe experience a first blind run, avoid using tricks like the one used to beat the final boss, avoid savefile reload and everything, I wouldn’t surprised seeing that time doubled or maybe even a bit more.