Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & The Secret Hideout DX Review (PC) – Back At Kurken Island

I have played through the Atelier Ryza series already before, but as I have not reviewed two of them officially for the site, I thought I would use the opportunity to replay the Atelier Ryza games through the Deluxe Editions and review the first two. I wasn’t as bought into them at first as I was a much bigger fan of Atelier Sophie and her adventures in the Mysterious Games. Let’s see if these Deluxe Editions can win me over!

Game Name: Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & The Secret Hideout DX
Platform(s): PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, PC (Reviewed)
Developer(s): GUST Studios
Publisher(s): Koei Tecmo
Release Date: November 13th, 2025
Price: $39.99

Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & The Secret Hideout DX has you in the shoes of Reisalin Stout, or Ryza for short. She and her two best friends, Tao and Lent, dream of adventure. They don’t want to be stuck on their little island of Kurken doing menial jobs. Ryza dreams of exploration, Lent dreams of being a reliable and powerful warrior, and Tao dreams of being an intelligent and investigative scholar. Their lives get put on a trajectory path forward as they meet Empel, an alchemist travelling the world, and Lila, his partner, who is a trained warrior. The whole island keeps pushing Ryza and her friends not to get too close to the pair, as alchemy is an unknown science to them. The more the inhabitants of the island push Ryza away, the more interested she gets in this brand-new phenomenon.

Living In Kurken Island

The gameplay loop of Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & The Secret Hideout DX is similar to other titles in the Atelier series. You get told of a problem. You and your friends research the problem by gathering resources and exploring the area available to you. Then Ryza will have an enlightening experience that teaches her how to solve it through alchemy, or Empel will help her with recipes to solve it through alchemy. Then you synthesize the object and solve the problem.

For the first half of the game, you can fast travel all around Kurken Island and to the mainland via travel signs. These signs only give you the names of locations, so you have to remember where things are. Once the second half starts, you get access to a travel map. With this map, you can fast travel to any location, and it has little icons to show where a side quest is, where the main quest is, and where you need to go to activate or start other side quests.

Side quests will be on the map areas as question marks. Once you start them, they will be green exclamation marks for where to progress or finish them. These side quests generally have you talk to people of Kurken Island and try to solve their problems. Sometimes, side quests can just be an actual conversation. Side quests reward you with Cole, the currency of this world, or materials.

Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & The Secret Hideout was a series first as it tried to make turn-based combat more active and engaging than the previous entries. There is a small timer that shows the placement of all the speeds of the active combatants in battle. When a character’s face reaches the end of the timer, they can choose to attack, use a skill, use an item, or try to flee. You can also move character positions in case someone is in front of an enemy, giving a specific place a barrage of attacks. Tactics levels dictate the power of skills or even the added effects of skills. It goes from level one to level five. As you do normal attacks, you gain AP. When your AP reaches a threshold, you can press a button, and it will make your tactic level go up by one.

This is where one of my nitpicks starts with the combat. As you reach Tactics Level three or higher, it becomes fun and dynamic to see all the animations a skill has and the actual combo string a character can pull off. When you are at Tactics levels one and two, it feels sluggish. Only letting you do two attacks in a combo, or skills that don’t do a lot of damage. You are reliant on speed stats to move your turn at a faster rate to level up as fast as you can. Boss fights always start you at level one, but normal mob fights you can start at level two if you attack them first in exploration mode. Mob fights aren’t that difficult, though, so it isn’t as important to reach Tactics level three or higher. You can generally beat them in a few turns, even at Tactics level two.

Exploration mode is where you will likely spend most of your time in Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & The Secret Hideout DX. You can travel to locations surrounding Kurken Island and the mainland. There are a bunch of different maps, but they do feel very limiting when you compare them to the other Atelier Ryza games. Eventually, you can get gathering tools through synthesis that help you move through obstacles. You will gather ingredients, materials, and other resources to use in synthesis. You are limited by your basket’s capacity, though. So don’t just go and grab everything you see. Be smart about what types of ingredients or materials you need. You can only travel as Ryza in exploration mode, but you can set the character you want to control in the menu for battle when combat starts.

Back In Time

Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & The Secret Hideout DX is an early look at the GUST studios’ current engine. It still has gorgeous character models with a lot of great facial expressions. It doesn’t have the prettiest textures, but it is still serviceable, and it still looks great overall. The UI is very minimalist, only having a minimap, a compass, the basket capacity, the time, and the current gathering tool equipped all in one small section of the lower right side of the screen. The rest of the screen is all yours to look around. Ingredients and materials you gather will show up on the left side of the screen.

I played this title mainly on my PC, mixed with time on Steam Deck. You would usually see in my reviews that I like playing games mostly on the Steam Deck, but I moved it to PC when I could. Mainly because Steam Deck isn’t the greatest way to experience this title. Steam Deck runs between 40 – 60 FPS. The textures and models’ fidelity are reduced a bunch to run it at that level, though. I compared the Steam Deck version with the Nintendo Switch 2 version, and man, it looks so good on the Nintendo Switch 2. It only runs at 30 FPS, but all the textures and the models look much, much better on Nintendo Switch 2. If you are going for a handheld experience, I would say go for the lower frame rate than the better frame rate, but everything looks like it’s running on a Nintendo 3DS. When I was playing on PC, the game ran at a consistent 120 FPS at 1440p on my NVIDIA RTX 4080 Super. If you have a high-end PC, this game looks gorgeous and runs well.

Atelier Ryza DX

Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & The Secret Hideout DX is a little different than the main game. First off as your progress the story you will start to unlock more playable characters than you would normally have. The first one you will unlock is Romy. Romy in the first Atelier Ryza entry is just a side quest merchant who wants help at various times in the game. She gains more prominence in the second game, though. She battles with yo-yos. It was weird to have her in my party, to be honest. It was nice to see her be in the game more, especially as you now get to read the voice actor’s message in the Extra menu you unlock in the game. That wasn’t in the first one.

The second character was one I was so happy to see make it as a playable character: Agatha. Agatha, in the first game, is the main guardian of the village and gives a lot of crap to Ryza for leaving the village as often as she does without supervision. Her moveset is focused on defence as she can buff your party’s stats, but she also has some heavy-hitting skills. The third one I was surprised wasn’t in the first game originally, which was Kilo. I don’t want to reveal anything about Kilo since she is an important character that you meet much later in the game.

There are now side episodes you can play through. The one I liked best was the after-story episode that takes place a year after the end of the game. Ryza is a substitute teacher for the school and is trying to teach the kids in the village. Eventually, she has to team up with Agatha and Romy when two of the kids go on their own adventures outside of the village. It adds more importance to Romy being on Kurken Island as well as lets us see Ryza experience Agatha’s fighting ability for herself. It also demonstrates the growth of Ryza as a character since the beginning of the game.

Time for another nitpick, at the beginning of the story, Ryza is a rebellious punk who shuns responsibility in favor of adventuring with her friends. As she goes on more adventures and learns more about alchemy, it teaches her responsibility and the importance of every person and skill. However, she still shuns her parents at every instance unless it lets her use alchemy. Her parents kind of just let her get away with everything, since you can’t really hold her down. At no time does she apologize to her parents for her antics or even try to take responsibility by helping them. That was one of the reasons I was irked by Ryza in my first playthrough, and it still annoys me today. It does annoy me a little less thanks to all her efforts in helping them in Atelier Ryza 3: Alchemist of the End & The Secret Key. I like that Ryza grows and develops, and still has her country bumpkin mentality. I just wish we got a through line of that in the first game. Atelier Ryza 2 does state that in the three years between Ryza 1 and Ryza 2 that she is much more helpful with her parents, but, sadly, we don’t get to see that in the DX release. The after-story episode doesn’t really star the parents at all. You know all I want is a simple Sorry from you, Ryza. Your parents are great and just want a little help around the big farm they own.

Atelier Ryza: The First Secret

Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & The Secret Hideout DX is an improved experience over the first game. It includes all the DLC of the base game, three new playable characters, and some more story threads that bring us to the second Atelier Ryza game. The combat can be a slog with the first attempt at bringing active combat elements into the turn-based system, but it does show the starting points that eventually bring us to how polished the Ryza series gets with Atelier Ryza 3. It is worth a playthrough if you are planning on understanding the Ryza trilogy, just so you can see where our cast of characters begins their journey. Ryza 2 and 3 are so much better to play through!

Atelier Ryza Secret Trilogy Deluxe Pack will release on November 13th, 2025, for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.

Review Disclosure Statement: Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & The Secret Hideout DX was provided to us by Koei Tecmo for review purposes. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy.

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