![]() You have a team of 3 daughters who are assigned a class with a set of skills. The game will be familiar by its initial approach to anyone who’s played a tactics title like X-Com. It’s definitely a story I would have liked to have seen to its conclusion, at least to try and garner a better picture of this bizarre, violent struggle. As you play the game further you unlock snippets of backstory through unlocking text and character info, though still things require some extrapolation from the player – it’s otherworldly setting with glimpses of a potential world outside of it, with its enemies based on plague doctors and mentions of acts by some of the characters and bosses. This leading to an endless cycle of death and rebirth until it can be broken – one would assume by defeating all the bad guys. Othercide’s story is a little obscure to say the least, though the initial premise essentially is that a warrior ‘mother’ commands her fighting daughters to take on foes in an attempt to prevent some great catastrophe (or suffering being born, as the game is putting it). Treat this review morally as an impressions if you want, and I am aiming this primarily at readers who are merely curious about the game as opposed to those looking for a dive into their next potential tactics obsession. Rather than throw this one out and chalk it up to experience, though, there can still be a lot said of use about a game that you haven’t finished, or in this case even come close to. It’s not a good feeling, and is the last thing you want as a reviewer of a game – give me a tedious, poorly designed game that I can complete any day over a good game that’s too much for my skill and patience – but it happens. It surprised me to discover it, but it turns out I do.I need to start this review by saying I have admitted defeat with Othercide. Whether Othercide is for you will depend on whether you have the patience for a roguelike where you can spend a good eight hours feeling like you're making no progress whatsoever, before suddenly breaking through. When I was failing to beat that first boss I had a far lower opinion of it, but when I finally made that breakthrough I got a great sense of accomplishment, as well as Remembrances that let me skip that boss and start my Daughters at a higher level, avoiding the grind that had tormented me entirely. It is very easy to come up short against a boss several times and feel like you're doing a lot of busywork for very little progress. #Othercide difficulty levels how toIt seems like a lot to keep track of, but it's all fairly intuitive once you get the hang of it, and there's a clever Chess-like quality in figuring out how to save a unit from impending doom. She's effectively skipped one of her turns to do more right now. But as she's used up more, she has to wait a whole 100 ticks. If I'd only spent 50 action points, Melody would be able to go again in 50 ticks. Unfortunately that doesn't do as much damage, so I have to attack several times. Melody could use her own delayed attack, Imbued Blade, which would kill the Therapist in one hit, but that wouldn't fire until step 50, so instead I go for a simpler attack that works immediately. So instead I move up Melody, a Blademaster (melee DPS class), who goes at 25. If Douce had a turn before 30, she could simply move out of range, but she doesn't go until 50. Let's draw an example: one of my Daughters, Douce, has been targeted by an enemy Curse Therapist with a delayed attack called Massive Shot, which will fire at initiative 30. You aren't going to get attached to your soldiers here, especially given the lack of real cosmetic customisation, instead you are going to see your Daughters as a resource to be gently fed into the meat grinder of the forever war. This means that any slip up, any damage taken will sooner or later result in the loss of a star performer. Even worse, some of your most powerful abilities spend health to activate. The only way for one of your Daughters to recover health is to sacrifice a Daughter of equal or higher level. Take healing, for example: there isn't any. Every system in the game is leveraged towards this feeling of hopelessness. The doom and gloom atmosphere isn't just confined to the striking black and white visuals however, Othercide really commits to the bit. It doesn't really need to define its terms-what matters is atmosphere, and this game is dripping with it. It's not a style of writing I'm usually a fan of, but big and abstract suits Othercide very well. Other extremely capitalised nouns also feature heavily. You are The Mother, some sort of eldritch being fighting against Suffering, with a capital S, to protect The Child, using resurrected soldiers called The Daughters. ![]()
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