I need to start this review by saying I have admitted defeat with Othercide. 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. 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. 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.
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). This leading to an endless cycle of death and rebirth until it can be broken – one would assume by defeating all the bad guys. 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. 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.
The game will be familiar by its initial approach to anyone who’s played a tactics title like X-Com. You have a team of 3 daughters who are assigned a class with a set of skills. You have some choice in what skills to progress with for each daughter, but there are a standard few attacks inherent to each character. You have a sword wielder, a shield carrier and a markswoman with dual pistols – the benefits and negatives of each are as you’d expect: the shield carrier is tanky, the markswoman is vulnerable but can engage from afar and the sword wielder is fast and vicious. Each of your daughters has an action meter which dictates how far they can move, what skills they can use, etc, and so you must think ahead to weigh up whether being defensive or offensive is the best option.
The crucial mechanic relating to this is the timeline. You’ll see at the bottom of the screen while you’re playing it shows when your characters and when the enemies are going to take their turn. With each action you move further down the timeline. There are a couple of interesting parts to this, the first being how the game allows you to ‘over move’ so you can risk your timeline position to squeeze something extra from your actions. Doing so, however, will not just move you slightly further up the timeline, but plonk you right at the very end regardless of the cost of your extra action, and this is the main risk factor attached. However, using this could spell the difference between extending a fight another turn (thus risking your daughters getting attacked) or finishing off a waning enemy.
The second part of this is how the game works this mechanic in to the skills and combat. You and your enemies will have skills which can impact on positioning on the timeline. Simply put, you could attack an enemy with a weaker strike, but the payoff from this skill is that it docks the enemy so many points, thus allowing one of your other daughters to take their turn earlier. Conversely, the enemy can do the same to you, which is why it is important to utilise the feature in the game which allows you to inspect a foe and their abilities. It can risk sounding complicated as a mechanic, but in practice it is amazingly simple to get used to for something that holds such significance to the tactical nature of the combat. Performing a successful Overwatch in the X-Com games was always so satisfying to pull off, and the same thing (albeit with a catch, which I’ll get into later) exists here. The battlefield is as much a puzzle game as anything else, and from what I could see during my time with Othercide, this works really well.
The game at its essence is about managing time and from this its rogue-like influences become apparent. At the hub section prior to starting missions it shows what day you are on, and as you progress so too does the game and its enemies. By this I mean that on certain days events will happen, bosses will attack, missions will open up, etc, and the aim of the game from this side of things it to last for as many days as you can before you are defeated or forced to restart from day one. The game won’t just demand a total restart however, and as is typical with rogue-like games there is some carry over when you restart. You are always awarded a resource when you start over, being able to use this to invest in bonuses for your next run. Your defeated daughters also go to a graveyard from which you can resurrect them, thus meaning that in theory you can restart the game with gradually increasing power and effectiveness. This works for the most part, though is a little more punishing than it can initially sound – you likely won’t be resurrecting more than one of your fallen daughters for a while and bonuses aren’t a direct power upgrade (more like chance buffs) and so progress can feel a bit tortured.
There are other ways to alleviate this, however, which includes upgrading skills (paid for by another resource) – these are unlocked from defeating enemies and must be applied to a daughter’s skills each run anew – you can ‘germinate’ new daughters to help in the fight and even sacrifice daughters in order to heal favoured ones. When you germinate a daughter you spend a resource to do so, picking their class and optional starting skill. This has benefits for a couple of reasons, firstly having another daughter to utilise is never a bad thing – you will quickly see your team for the disposable warriors that they are – and it gives you more chance to complete missions and gain the resources that they offer. You can only use a daughter once per day, and so when the game offers more than one mission, having more than the starting 3 daughters allows you to complete more than one. It’s simple, really, but it can take a bit of getting used to, especially if you go in with the mind-set of wanting to protect all members of your team (not getting too attached).
The latter point I raised might have sounded a bit odd – sacrificing daughters to heal others – but this highlights a feature of the game which I find makes it so much more difficult, and this is that damage stays with you from start to finish. If your daughters take damage during a mission you do not regain this health for the next day, you cannot apply items to heal them and you don’t replenish health when you level up. The only way to heal your daughters is to sacrifice another one. This is another reason why having more daughters germinated becomes important, though there’s still a slight catch to this as you can only sacrifice daughters of the same or higher level to the one you are healing (no stocking up on level 1 daughters for cheap healing!). You might ask how you could justify that, but sacrificing will also apply a bonus to the healed daughter, so technically they are not just back to full health but also more powerful.
The idea that you can’t heal by normal means results in levels not just being about avoiding death, but avoiding damage unless absolutely necessary. This also effects your abilities, as that Overwatch ability I mentioned (you can stand guard to attack an enemy on their move if, for example, they attack you or an ally) actually does a bit of damage to your daughter just to activate it – use this ability too often and you can find yourself in trouble.
You quickly start to realise that Othercide is quite serious and won’t hold your hand in any way going forward, and this level of difficulty is something really important to consider if you don’t want to end up quitting like me or just playing a game you’re not going to enjoy. But there’s also some intrinsic inconsistency to how the difficulty feels, and this is as a result I think of how it classifies the difficulty of its missions and also how significantly it jumps in its base difficulty. Missions take a few forms, either simple clear missions where you need to kill all the enemies in a level, escape mission where you need to survive until you can move your daughters out, and rescue missions where you protect an NPC while moving it to an end point. All of these have a difficulty classification which ranges between challenging, hard and impossible. The problem is, none of these are actually that difficult to complete if you are even a novice at tactical games, and the difficulty just comes from the increased chance of your daughters losing health which you may never recover. I think it’s actually quite a unique idea and an interesting concept from a long-term tactical perspective, so why do I have such a problem? The answer is pacing.
The concept creates a false sense of security which is then levelled when you reach your first boss encounter. It’s not exactly an objective flaw, but it is a very jarring experience, and depending on your success attempting it in your next few ‘runs’ it can reveal the very repetitive nature of the game. It will be for many the first proper loss of the game, and as I attempted this again and again – while experiencing very little trouble with the preceding missions – I began to ask myself what the actual point of the rest of the game was beyond a grind to gradually make the inevitable boss fights more manageable. And this is something you need to realise before going into the game, it is punishing by its very nature in quite a misleading manner – it isn’t an X-Com-like game, despite the comparison and if you go into it thinking you are getting some grim-dark take on that series, you will be very shocked with what you get.
But this of course isn’t to say that the game is not fun, or even that this brutal tone won’t appeal to some, as the game has plenty of flair in its combat and a stylish, if minimalistic, aesthetic which is very enjoyable. I liked completing the missions, and thinking about future moves – on the battlefield and off – was mostly a satisfying and involved experience. The combat is quite hard hitting, being punchy and quick, and the black and white (and red) art style accompanies the mysterious, severe feel of the narrative and its world. The music created for the game is very cool as well, and the enemy designs are intriguing – like creepy, demonic plague doctors.
To summarise my feelings on the game, it definitely wasn’t for me and the primary reason for this was the difficulty in boss encounters – proving to literally be an obstacle to my progression with the game. It’s always a difficult thing to quantify, especially when reviewing, as a game being hard isn’t necessarily a criticism as long as it is balanced for this, but it must be realised that regardless of this – and especially if a developer has chosen to make their game difficult with no option for the player to modify this – that it will be very off putting to some people. There’s been the debate/frustration for ages with games in the Souls series, where players may like the aesthetic and gameplay of the title but are ultimately put off by how punishing the game is, and this feels like a similar situation.
I feel mostly confident in recommending this as a unique and thoughtful tactics game to those who can accept the punishment and knowledge that this requires a lot of repetition to get into, but also that it is inherently a frustrating game with little recompense for this – I suppose other than the satisfaction that comes from eventually managing to succeed. It’s all up to you whether you think this will be something you can stick with, but for me it wasn’t.