Interregnum: False Prophet

Looks like the devs have left this one in the lurch, apparently they've left their own Discord server and haven't posted anything anywhere. I don't know if they're having financial issues or the game didn't get the support they wanted or what, but apparently this isn't the first time they've done this so I wouldn't hold your breath for more updates. Original review below for posterity. I've put in a number of hours now so here are my updated thoughts on the game. TL;DR: Needs a lot of polish, stability improvements and QoL improvements before it's truly worth playing, needs a lot more content before it's truly worth buying. The devs seem like they want to improve the situation, so come back in a year and see what's what. Spoilers for chapter one and the prologue by the way, since that's all there is right now, I don't normally do this but I feel it's important to cover just how little there is here. Synopsis: You start in a shelter, someone's kid gets stolen, you go shoot some bandits to get him back and it turns out it was all orchestrated by the military. The military attack, you kill them and jack their truck, you lie about hearing about a safe city on your fancy space radio and also in some visions and dreams (because they had to shoehorn in the core concept somewhere) and off you trot across the icy wastes. You loot a bunch of stuff to build a bunch of gas tanks on your truck and you leave, ending chapter one. This doesn't sound like a lot of content, and I've shortened it somewhat sure, but not by much. You get the occasional radio message establishing The Lore but it's bare minimum stuff and other than that all you get is random events that repeat all too frequently as you wander around looting the same 5-10 items until you have enough to build a bunch of gas tanks and leave. Every companion has 2 scripted conversations where they pretend like they're bonding with you but this is based purely on morale so really all you need to do is get them to drink a bunch of coca cola until they call you the Messiah. Keeping the caravan fed is a chore as the population grows because they won't automatically consume food produced by the kitchen or hunter meaning you have to manually right click donate each piece of meat individually, and you can't even do that because to do that you have to open the donation box and you can't have the donation box and the stash open at the same time so you have to drag all that meat into your inventory and then right click donate it all individually. Half the game's mechanics are just veneers with no actual depth. Faith does nothing at all, contentment never strays from 50%, sick people never recover. Wait long enough and I'm not even kidding, you'll get the same random event so many times that it'll turn out every single member of your 50 person caravan was a mentally ill mother who stole someone's baby and therefore turns from a healthy worker into a sick one that never recovers. Half the items don't do anything when donated, for example you'll get faith for donating a shotgun but nothing for donating 10 million shotgun shells. You get nothing for donating soft drinks or gelato which means their singular purpose is to advance companions personal "questlines" or stories or whatever which means you just save up a bunch of coke and ice cream and as soon as you get a new character you just force it all down their gullet until they love you. I haven't tried to be clear, but I'm fairly certain that if you wanted to you could complete the entire game's content currently in an hour, literally all you have to do is fight some bandits, fight some soldiers, gather a bunch of food and build a bunch of gas tanks and you're done, everything else is fluff. As for combat it's essentially just the same three fights over and over. Bandits, Survivors and Military. Functionally there's no difference between them, you can do a skill check to ambush someone but you just start stood out in the open the same as any other fight so there's no point. You can negotiate with survivors but they will literally all invariably try to fight you afterwards so it's not worth the pretense. You start a fight, you take cover, every member of the enemy team takes a stim or drinks an energy drink and then you use an assault rifle to kill them all in one turn and go about your day. Looting is similarly unsatisfying, half the items are useless, I never used a medical item besides bandages occasionally in the entire playthrough. I never had a reason to do anything other than a full food pot and giant bonfire, it's so easy to meet all your needs and yet you still have to do it so often that it's just dull. Random events will say stuff like "Wow what a find" and then reward you with a rag. You'll literally rip off an eldritch shadow demon's arm and it'll mention you get to keep the arm and then it rewards you with a shirt or whatever. There's no cool and weird loot to collect, there's no neat unique items, it's just food, coke & ice cream, bullets and garbage all the way down. You guys have some fantastic ideas, really, but I came into this as a guy that literally just liked the idea of wandering an icy wasteland gathering loot and stacking it neatly in boxes. My requirements to enjoy my time with this game were so low and yet I'm still disappointed. I can't help but be annoyed because literally all there is to do in this game is loot crap and shoot crap and both of those are poorly executed and repetitive. You released this way too early and should count your lucky stars you have as few reviews as you do because if the game received much more media attention you'd be absolutely panned, and that's without even mentioning the stability issues.

A big shame because I played the demo a lot, and the game showed a lot of promise. But it seems dead as of now. The updates have stopped, devs discord is pretty much inactive, and the team (which was quite active on the discord some time ago) stopped responding to questions. If you're reading this in 2028 and it's finished then disregard. But I can't recommend the game in its current state. It's playable and can be fun when it works, but on the other hand there's still a long time of polish and bug fixes that are necessary here, and right now it doesn't look like anyone is working on the game.

Okay. So...here's the thing. There's a lot of good in this game. But there's also a lot of bad. Let me just try to sum it all up. Good: -Gameplay -Sound Design -Price Bad: -Writing -Gameplay -Stability The game has just as much good as it does bad. So my thumbs down is literally just because the game wasn't for me but it might be for you. My problems with this game are as follows: The game doesn't do anything new or innovative. It's lacking in creativity. It's pretentious writing. It's broken buggy gameplay. It's lack of immersion. It's lack of character development. It's lack of tutorial. It's incredibly unfair difficulty setting that you're forced to play with. It's unfinished. The voice acting (when it shows up) is cringey and kinda lame. it's writing is trying very hard to sound deep but doesn't explain anything. I mean I have no idea what happened, when or why. I don't care about my characters because there was no development or build up. I don't care about the world because of same. The combat AI is broken and unexplained. And the game isn't doing anything new enough or innovative enough to encourage me to want to play further. I think one day this could be a fun little game. But it's pricetag is very appropriate because I don't feel this game is worth more than 25 dollars. It looks pretty good at most levels. It's gameplay is fairly standard. But when I think of how broken it's combat is. How lame and annoying its writing is. And how it's lacking in QoL standards and I feel that as of this moment I can't give it a thumbs up. It's too broken and too unfinished I think. thanks so much for reading and I hope I managed to help some of you out there spend your money wisely.

The game was poorly marketed and had a minimal following. It's been abandoned by the developers before Early Access even ended. No refunds available. This is all a shame, because it has the bones of a really good game! But without clearing out the bugs, and doing a couple small upgrades, it's just not worth any cost, and its going to fall by the wayside. From what I understand, most if not all of the development team has be laid off. If someone wanted to take the blueprints of this game and build from it, I think they would have a real winner, with proper marketing. Sad loss of potential.

Ok, tinkered for about half an hour and here's my preview. 1- Game has clear inspirations from Wasteland 3, ATOM, and maybe This War Of Mine. Gameplay mechanics include Inventory Management, Crew Management and maybe in future, Settlement Management (not progressed far enough, so can't tell if it already has). 2- Whatever mechanics is there, it's solid enough. No bugs encountered yet but again, too early to tell. 3- Turn based shooting gameplay can be tense, because the game is locked to hardcore mode only for now. Actions can have consequences in that either that'll lose you time if you choose to restart the encounter from beginning or lose a crew member. There's also friendly fire. 4- Crafting part is not deep yet, can be forgiven since it's an EA title. Will see how often the dev(s) add stuff into the game to judge this. As for the suggestions, please pause game in crafting window since whenever I click sth, my crew moves and wastes time/energy. Secondly, needs a keybind option ASAP. I don't know if I can rotate stuff to add to my inventory, for example. Furthermore, you may want to move crew status window from hovering to another seperate tab like inventory/crafting. These are the ones that I was able to gather from my half an hour of gameplay. All in all, shows promise. Hope it won't turn into those EA games being half arsed and abandoned later on. Can recommend in its current state if you're a fan of the games I mentioned in the beginning. EDIT: Decided to refund the game based on other reviews sayng that this company not having a good track record. Haven't played the demo so can't comment on it but people are saying that nothing new has been added since last year's demo is a big red flag for me. Will chack back in a year.

Experienced a game breaking bug about six hours in. Found the developers Discord server and it looks like it's an abandoned project. Don't bother with this until the developers show signs of life.

Why is this steaming pile of EA sheet still on Steam for people to buy?! The developer was a scumbag that abandoned the project and ran off with people's money! Total EA ripoff Get rid of Early Access.

I tried to make it work, but unfortunately, this game is full of bugs and unbalanced. That's sad, because I love the theme and the environment.

There is something interesting about the "tactical advantage" thing they have added to combat, needs a bit more fleshing out perhaps. Otherwise it appears this would take many many years of work to get better, and the sales will never support that, this is an egregious example of how early access will kill all trust in game developers

[i]I don't get why this game and those DEVs get so much heat and trash talk... I just don't. Firstly I followed this game via YouTube vids for quite some time now and it looked really interesting and appealing. Was very eager to buy it after it was released as EA but decided to wait a bit and then saw so many negative comments about it (that kinda repelled me from getting it for about day or two but I finally decided to follow my own instincts). Those negative stuff are mostly coming from some ridiculous people that have insane prejudices and unrealistic expectations from it like they have an idea of what would be an ideal game for them and then get very ragey when they realize this is not EXACTLY as they imagined it to be (which is a complete bs kids behavior). There are like gameplay videos and demos you can easily get your hands on and see/experience it before you buy it, why sh*t on the game and the DEV team afterwards just because something doesn't hit spots in your brain the way you wanted it to do is beyond my apprehension. Truly and honestly.[/i] Now when that part is out of the way, lemme get to the point... [u]It's a fabulous idea and a strong basis for a game.[/u] Most of the mechanics are really neat, it has beautiful soundtrack and graphics are nice and pleasant. Story and in-game world is mega enjoyable! Writing is decent... What it lacks is a bit more voicing but maybe they don't have enough budget for a full voice and voiceovers and some usual general improvements. Yes this game has bugs... But every game has bugs even the game breaking ones. It's the very early stage of Early Access for crying out loud (bugs, exploits, CTDs, minority of settings, non-balance, partial content, etc.), you should expect this if you ever touched or saw any of the EA content. Ever. And yes it's a very much still work in progress and yes it needs to go a long-ish way, but it has soooo much potential and it feels actually extremely good to play with. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ TL;DR [susceptible to edits] I was reluctant to buy it after I read some of the comments and reviews but if you like those types of games, trust me, this one is utterly worth this price even at this ultra early stage... The progress will be magnificent and it CAN become probably one of the top 5 best TBS survival tactical RPG games of last 10 years, and that...that is definitely NOT a small feat. DEV team, you got this, just take your time and invest all the love you have in this project, it will be awesome -- you can make it be awesome! :) Current state PROS (IMHO): [list][*]*Story [*]*In-game world settings/ambient [*]*Sounds and music [*]*Animations [*]*Game mechanics (some superb innovative and not innovative but stuff seen before that work very well) [*]*Design (models and real-time visuals, UI looks, font and similar) [*]*Graphics in general (like weather, particles, shading, lightings, etc.) [*][b][u]*Frequency and density of updates and fixes[/u][/b][/list] -Writing is decent (if you ignore some grammar and syntax mistakes) Current state CONS (for me): [list][*]*Lack of voice acting /// not everything needs to be voice acted but maybe some key points or characters of the game can be? [*]*Poor-ish tutorial /// this should be fixed at the end if at all [*]*UI issues (like for example text on radio calls scrolling way too fast to follow/read) and no/confusing tooltips /// polishing phase [*]Various imbalance (especially for "easy mode") /// don't expect this to be fixed much before full version [*]*RNG /// think this is the biggest issue so far, at least for me, and I wish Interregnum had 3 difficulty settings to choose from; with RNG (loot, [re]searchable buildings, recruitment, etc.] and maybe even some game mechanics being exclusive and balanced across each one separately [*]*Variety (mainly for POIs) but also for equipment in general, characters, cool locations (maybe different maps and submaps/zones?), etc. [*]*QoL /// this should just come naturally over time as tests go on[/list] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ [b]All in all, it's a great game even at this point and I'm 100% satisfied with 25 bucks I spent on it -- those DEVs deserve all the support and patience from us. I can see this one easily becoming one of my favorites + it has almost infinite potential which is phenomenal! :) Humongous kudos to you guys.[/b]