The Age of Decadence (2015)
The Age of Decadence is a 2015 role-playing (rpg) video game made by Iron Tower Studio.
Iron Tower Studio builds a deliberately harsh RPG on the ashes of a fallen empire modelled on collapsing Rome, where magic has all but died and every faction wants you dead or useful. Combat is turn-based and often unwinnable by force alone, so your character sheet, silver tongue and alliances decide more than your sword. Quests fork wildly on skills and reputation, and whole storylines stay hidden unless you built the right character. The text runs deep, failure is common, and the low-magic world stays grim, political and unforgiving from the first choice onward.
Quick answers
What is The Age of Decadence about?
Iron Tower Studio builds a deliberately harsh RPG on the ashes of a fallen empire modelled on collapsing Rome, where magic has all but died and every faction wants you dead or useful. Combat is turn-based and often unwinnable by force alone, so your character sheet, silver tongue and alliances decide more than your sword. Quests fork wildly on skills and reputation, and whole storylines stay hidden unless you built the right character. The text runs deep, failure is common, and the low-magic world stays grim, political and unforgiving from the first choice onward.
When was The Age of Decadence released?
The Age of Decadence was released on 14 October 2015.
Who made The Age of Decadence?
The Age of Decadence was made by Iron Tower Studio.
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Explore The Age of Decadence guides
The Age of Decadence in our writing
- Companion guide: The CRPG: The Complete Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games
- Companion guide: The CRPG Renaissance: How Kickstarter Brought the Genre Back from the Dead
A few thoughts on The Age of Decadence
For the same brutal, calculated intrigue with barely any magic, Game of Thrones is the natural screen pairing, and Vikings brings the low-magic faction warfare down to muddy ground. Two games sit closest in spirit: Disco Elysium for text-first, skill-driven storytelling, and Planescape: Torment for RPGs that reward reading over fighting. HBO's Rome supplies the imperial-decadence backdrop the whole world borrows from.
TV shows about thrones that never stay secure
The Age of Decadence drops you into a crumbling empire where every faction wants you dead or useful, a world these shows would recognize. Rome tracks an actual empire's slow collapse through ambition and betrayal. Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon build entire seasons out of the same factional knife-fighting, and Vikings shows how quickly a warband's loyalty turns once real power is on the table.
Games where you inherit a fallen kingdom's ruins
Iron Tower built The Age of Decadence on the ashes of a collapsed empire, and these games share that scavenger's view of a broken world. Elden Ring and Hollow Knight both hand you a shattered kingdom's ruins and let ambition, not a quest marker, decide where you dig. The Witcher 3's Continent and Bioshock Infinite's Columbia round it out, two more societies that rotted from the inside before you arrived.
Fiction where no one gets to stay innocent
The Age of Decadence refuses easy morality: every path costs something and failure is common. Watchmen strips the same gloss off heroism, showing power corrupting everyone who holds it. Made in Abyss makes exploration's price brutally literal, while Dororo's hero claws back his stolen body one demon at a time, and Black Butler wraps its Victorian intrigue around a bargain nobody walks away from clean.
Metal for a low-magic world in decline
The Age of Decadence plays out in a low-magic world already rotting from within, a mood this music shares. King Crimson's debut built dread and grandeur out of a single crimson figure of ruin. Fates Warning's The Spectre Within and Dimmu Borgir's IX Equilibrium keep that same doom-heavy scale, and Judas Priest's Painkiller closes it out with its own apocalyptic myth of a savior riding in against overwhelming odds.