But the games lore is steeped in grim notions so at least it fits in with the nature of it. Spawning new units just so they can be fodder is a grim notion. Early in the Era you can germinate more Daughters to feed to the ones of equal level before they ding over to the next, and this feels a bit creepy. This healing mechanic means you’re strategically cycling your Daughters out of play.

Once you’ve sacrificed one into another the surviving Daughter retains a trait from the unit used to heal her, which is usually a decent boost like damage increase, more health or an increase to crit chance. The problem with this is you can only sacrifice a Daughter of the same or higher level, so you can’t just spawn a level 1 unit and smash it into a level 5. The only way to heal units is to ‘Sacrifice’ a Daughter to another Daughter. The large downside to using health as a currency is there’s no way to heal your Daughters in mission. The downside to powerful reaction abilities like Intercepting Round is that they cost a percentage of your maximum health instead of AP, which is a blessing and a curse as you can use up your AP on movement and hitting things in the face and then prepare a reaction as well. The enemies tend to attack the nearest Daughter to them and so keeping a Soulslinger in range of your other units is beneficial. This ability will interrupt the first attack on a friendly unit within 10 spaces, preventing that attack and dealing a little damage to the attacking unit. For example, Soulslinger has a Reaction named ‘Intercepting Round’. The way these abilities interact with other Daughters is key to succeeding. All are pretty self explanatory instant is, well, instant, reaction activates when certain conditions have been met (such as an enemy moving into melee range) and delayed is usually a powerful move which requires a certain amount of time on the initiative track before it activates.Īs you level Daughters they acquire new abilities, so you can tailor them for mission versatility, although after a while I found I started taking certain abilities every time they came up as they proved to be the most dependable in the majority of situations. Each action you take uses up the Action Points of that unit, be it moving or using an attack or giving a boost to a friendly unit and then moves you accordingly down the initiative track, placing you in front of or behind enemies and friendly units chronologically.Įach action is divided up into Instant, Reaction or Delayed. When in a mission there is an initiative timeline where friendly and enemy units are placed in turn order. If I’m honest, that part of the game is exhausting.Īesthetics aside, the game has some interesting and rather satisfying gameplay mechanics. Thematically the game is incredibly sincere and stoic, with a Sin City/Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow black/white/red aesthetic and very deliberate terminology, descriptions and lore. Right, does that make sense? Are we keeping up? It’s quite difficult to parse a lot of this information initially because hoo boy does this game love its nouns. Era is the term for the collection of Synapses which end with a boss battle. Remembrances are run modifiers which afford you boones such as the resurrection tokens to bring back lost Daughters from the graveyard (levels, abilities, traits and all), modifiers right from the beginning to equip to abilities, health boosts or even the means to skip an entire Era. Once you start the new run you can use Shards, a currency acquired as rewards for successful mission completion along with Vitae and XP, to activate any Remembrances you have unlocked. Any Memories you found are unequipped and discarded, as are any unused ones. You then start a new run, but you start with 3 new Daughters, the old ones being consigned to the graveyard as a penalty of death.

And if (when) you fail a boss that’s that run over with. Then you get to take on a boss and inevitably get your arse handed to you, at least at first. Vitae is also used to assign Memories (modifiers) to Daughters abilities. You then take on Recollections (a roguelike run through) where you close Synapses (missions), earning Vitae to germinate more Daughters. You do this by wielding your Daughters against the massed hordes of nightmares, cultists and other agents of this unknowable darkness.Įach Daughter is germinated (actually the official term used in-game, because this game really likes using obtuse terminology) and is assigned a type Shieldbearer, Souslinger or Blademaster (essentially tank/defensive, ranged and offensive units). Your role is The Mother, an eternal being fighting through the ages against the Suffering. Othercide is probably what you’d get if you made XCom but the designers had been obsessed with 90’s Brandon Lee goth swansong The Crow and 18th century plague doctors. And then put a central roguelike mechanic in it.

Shieldbearer othercide