There’s something like a story being told in between the game’s combat scenarios, but the narrative mostly serves as an excuse for atmosphere. There’s much more to the system, including interrupts, deferred actions, and the ability to overspend action points in an effort to finish off an enemy, but the essence of the system is that every decision comes at a cost, asking you to balance risk and reward, vulnerability and victory. Certain attacks not only inflict damage on enemies but also delay their attacks, potentially allowing you to sneak in another attack. It’s not dissimilar to the timeline in Mike Bithell’s John Wick Hex. In addition to the sacrifice mechanic, this precision comes from the game’s Dynamic Timeline System – an initiative system in which the more action points you spend performing attacks or special moves, the further you’re pushed back on the timeline and the closer you inch towards the enemies’ turns to attack. The mechanics of Othercide ask the player for thoughtful precision, though it’s not as harsh as XCOM 2.
#OTHERCIDE MOTHER HOW TO#
You are the “mother” deciding how to spend the lives of your children, a process that involves painfully weighing one soldier’s skills and hit points against another’s. You can resurrect daughters from previous runs, though only at the cost of relatively rare tokens. Your “daughters” (as the game refers to the Blademasters, Shieldbearers, and Soulsingers making up your team) can only be healed by sacrificing another daughter of equal or greater level. To the contrary, the entire game revolves around profiting from your squad’s deaths. In Othercide, death doesn’t mean an end to progression. Yet like the better roguelites (Supergiant’s amazing Hades, for example), tight mechanical precision produces a compelling game loop in which the player’s increasing skill is its own kind of progress. Like most games in the rogue family, narrative takes a backseat to mechanics and repetition overhelms a strong sense of forward movement.
The first time you run through the game, you’ll almost certainly be underpowered when you reach the first boss, but as you execute new runs (“recollections”), you earn currency (“shards”) for upgrades that carry from one run to the next. As a roguelite, the game expects you to lose – and to lose – and to lose.
What really distinguishes Othercide from the busy market of tactics games is that it’s a roguelite with a sacrifice mechanic. When one of your squad members critically hits an enemy in Othercide, a 2D illustration of her flashes on the screen, dripping with stylized shadows. Like last year’s XCOM: Chimera Squad, Othercide stands out from most other tactics games because it ditches earthtones and realistically-rendered animations in favor of an anime emphasis on bombastic action. The game’s art style is striking, with characters and monsters sharply rendered in black and white, splashes of red flashing across the screen as you successfully execute attacks or succumb to the onslaught of the Suffering’s minions. You’re fighting off the advances of the Suffering: creatures that are equal parts Victorian cosplay and Lovecraftian horrors from the deep. It’s a turn-based tactics game in which you control a team of goth girls wielding oversized swords and vintage guns.
Othercide (Lightbulb Crew) is what happens when the soldiers from X-COM go through a goth phase and start frequenting Hot Topic.
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