Othercide

It's beautiful. It's fun. It's mysterious. It's not worth £25, it's definitely worth £3.74 (RRP and current price at time of review respectively). What I'd say it's worth probably falls somewhere in between, maybe £12? Get it at 50%. Keep your expectations reasonable. It's a game that sells itself on its style. Play on Easy Mode. I get the symbolic point behind the healing system but it's a huge PITA that in practice I think makes the game too difficult for the kind of player who would enjoy the simplified form-over-function XCOM combat. 10/10 visuals, 6/10 gameplay, 8/10 total. Recommended at 50% or lower of RRP. Notably all above average. I'll probably beat the game, or watch one of my girlfriends beat it. Edit: Spelling.

Okay, so there's actually a good game in here. A lot of the negatives bashing it for core design decisions aren't really legitimate criticisms. But there's enough individual little flaws that add up that make it hard to recommend. I'm no stranger to "masochistic" games as I tend to enjoy games like Fear and Hunger or Iron Man X-COM. In broad strokes the game is a combination of rogue-like and X-COM. You are expected to fail runs and start over with stronger buffs you can purchase for each run (i.e. Remembrances). These benefits include free resurrection tokens to bring back your strongest and favorite Daughters (basically your heroes) or starting at a later chapter in the game or being able to recruit new Daughters at a higher base level. So there's a progression system in place to make later runs easier. There's lots of complaints about spending health or sacrificing your Daughters as health potions to your other Daughters and this is really over-stated. Games like Hades expect you to try and manage your health to get through a run. Some skills do cost hp, which sounds scary at first, until you recognize that using those skills prevent more damage than you'd lose on activating on the skill. Many of this skills tank damage, interrupt attacks or let you dps race bosses. So they'll outright prevent more hp loss or death than if you didn't use those skills. I've had Shieldbearers just tank killer move after killer move from bosses and because hp-based skills only drain a % of current health, your Daughters can hold out for a long time. And this is all worthwhile if you beat a chapter since this unlocks a lot of the major milestone upgrades I mentioned above. That's a good time to reset the run since you can get a fresh start with all your new upgrades to play with. There's also nifty management tricks like saccing a damaged higher level daughter to heal a lower level one and give them a substantial buff -- then rezzing your sacrificed daughter to bring her back to full hp. If you liked Darkest Dungeon, then there's a similar cutthroat HR management system in place here. As you encounter enemies, codex entries open up explaining their behavior. One enemy will focus your backline and ignore your other daughters entirely. Others will target the closest daughter with the highest hp and so on. So as you learn the game you can somewhat reliably plan around the enemy AI. You learn to prioritize which targets you can focus or ignore. Where the game gets really frustrating is that unless you save scum a lot, The UI doesn't always communicate how boss moves work or some weird edge-case AI behaviors. Sometimes melee enemies will move their full distance to touch a Daughter and not attack, and other times they will. Newly spawned enemies won't attack you right away. *Usually.* Unless they're specific types of ranged enemy. Or you're camping their spawn. You don't learn without experiencing this. There's a bug which curses some runs. This bug causes melee enemies to randomly hit you in from across the map. Which wasn't quite enough to ruin my runs and progress to another chapter. But man, it's frustrating that devs haven't fixed this one yet. The UI in generally contributes to the game being unreadable. Bosses and other enemies have reaction moves or special states they enter on trigger conditions. The Deacon boss is a notorious example of this and I had to save scum the mission repeatedly to learn his pattern. I'd really like it if there were better tooltips, some aggro indicators highlighting enemy intent and the ability to read the enemy codex in combat, especially as this game tends to lean more toward being a more pure "chess-like" strategy game. You really want to take your time planning out your moves. And man, it's not fun restarting the same mission a dozen times to try and figure all this out. In addition, scrolling the map and trying to examine enemies for their move range and turn order is a pain in the ass because most of the game just uses red highlights and greyscale for everything and the scroll speed is so dang slow. Enemies also don't highlight in red on the turn order timeline when you pan over them. And the UI can get "sticky" making it hard to cancel out of examining enemies, input commands or pan back to your active daughter without accidentally inputting a move you don't want her to make. There's just generally this clunky feel about everything. All-in-all all the friction from these minor issues just add up to get in the way a game which I'd otherwise enjoy for its challenge. It's legitimately addicting once you really get into it. There's not enough straws on the camel's back to break the entire experience, but it's damn near close. That said, I got the game on sale for $3, so I can't complain. I'd really recommend the devs to work on the polish and improving readability and signalling.