Tenebris: Terra Incognita

I'm on the fence about this title, but I'm giving Tenebris a thumbs-up because it's a pretty good game, even if it is not that fun for me. Some gamers will love it and some won't. Read on to see which camp you'll be in. Story. The world-building is both familiar (with a reliance on classic sci-fi tropes) and clever, with recruiting heroes being skinned as "waking them from cryostasis" and a lot of love for the movie version of Starship Troopers and Alien. Your enemies are nasty bug-aliens who are smart but seem animal-like, with plenty of poison, acid, and drippy yucky gas and fluid attacks. There is base building that unlocks the hospital beds to rest up, a shop for equipment, and so on. There are nods to the gung-ho manic suicidal soldier trope. If this sounds entertaining, you may enjoy it. Gameplay. The main game loop involves picking some of your soldiers to walk slowly on patrol through a painted backdrop, such as a starship corridor or a dark tunnel, like in the original Darkest Dungeon. Your heroes are heavily-armed soldiers that work as medics to heal and remove debuffs, techs to debuff and unlock stuff, damage-spec gunmen with assault rifles, snipers, and heavies that soak damage. They stand in a mob and fight like Darkest Dungeon heroes, doing damage on most attacks and occasionally getting unlucky. Unlike DD, after each fight you heal back to full and restore all your armor points, so you just need to win each fight to heal up. You don't usually see monsters before you bump into them; they spawn when you hit a point in the corridor. There also aren't a lot of branches in the pathway, so you don't backtrack or get "stuck" as you walk through. Fights are turn-based and you pick a power, some with a recharge time, and on enemy turns they do the same stuff. I did not find that tactics mattered a whole lot, but squad composition did. Throughout your walking, there is a hidden object-like minigame which usually flashes a little glint to signal you should click on the backdrop to get some loot. Often these are from loose floor panels, crystals, or other "obvious" clickables, but there are also lots of things that look the same that don't give you prizes. There are more obvious chests and dead enemies (and friends) around that you can also click to get loot. If you miss them they're lost, though if you go slow you usually get everything. In addition to the combat game and the searching game, there are several little minigames involving hitting a key at the right point to unlock doors, chests, and remove traps. When you're back at base, you can spend the loot you got to buy items, upgrade the base, and recruit new Level 1 (or occasionally better) heroes. There are also conversations with the crew of the ship, which are scripted and in my opinion generally badly written. This part in particular gives off a mobile game feeling and I wonder if they originally planned for this to be a phone game, since the DNA of these choices feels so mobile game. I kept half expecting to see "dailies" and "weeklies" and a guild with raids showing up. What I Hated. There are a few parts I really disliked. First, I picked it up because I love Darkest Dungeon. Because you have few choices of route and don't really accumulate pain as you go due to the insta-heal after each fight, it wears thin fast. There isn't much risk/reward trade-off where you might consider bailing on a mission midway, or having to really push through the pain to get somewhere. I suspect less masochistic people may prefer it this way, but I missed the loot-stacking high-risk choices in DD. Even with permadeath, the lack of choice makes the permadeath just feel punitive and luck-driven rather than based on my own failings as a human being. What makes X-COM and DD work so well is the feeling that your hero dying was, at least in part, your own fault and not just bad luck, even though bad luck clearly played a factor. You can't ignore your own greed in the "why I died" equation, whereas here you pretty much know it was not your choice to press on or not. Second, the loot in the game is all keyed to character levels in an irritating way that resembles the worst mobile game features. Why can't I use a Level 6 gun at Level 3, if I found it? You spend a lot of time rotating the same guns from your senior people to the junior folks, which does not feel like a lot of fun. The differences between items are mostly minor and the Diablo-style randomization doesn't bring me excitement. I think this would be fixed easily if you removed level restrictions on items, which might also help junior squaddies to survive on higher-level missions. Summing Up. There is a lot to like here, but the game gives bad mobile vibes too often for me to enjoy it. Nonetheless, it's low-cost and pleasant for those who dreamed of a less punitive DD that railroads you better.