Othercide PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One
Here in the torrid midnight realm of Othercide, past selves are cannon fodder. The protagonist is an immortal warrior known as Mother, stripped of her flesh after failing to avert a cataclysm wrought by a supernatural Child. Now a frail ember hovering against a spiral of butchered architecture, she sculpts memories into Daughters, sending them to battle the minions of a being called Suffering. Reflections of the Child’s torments in life, the enemies are a grotesque bunch – fleshy gargoyles, beaked plague doctors and bloated clerics with keyholes for hearts. The Daughters are more horrifying still, each the same woman caught in a cycle of selfdivision. Sorted into four combat classes, they are pure white at gestation but discolour with experience, growing yellow-eyed and shadow-streaked, like oily seabirds.
Atop this lurid foundation Lightbulb Crew has built one of the year’s finest grid-based strategy games, a steely and engrossing work of calculation that recalls Pathologic and Bloodborne as much as it does XCOM or Final Fantasy Tactics. Set around the end of the 19th century, the campaign is divided into Ages, each consisting of dozen or so turns and presided over by a figure from the Child’s life, who serves as chapter boss. Each Daughter can join in a single battle per campaign turn, descending in small groups to single-elevation maps that are as nightmarish in appearance as they are straightforward of layout.
Complexity is created not by the geometry but the timeline along the bottom of the screen, with characters and enemies acting in left-to-right order. Each Daughter has an action points bar for movement and abilities, some of which have a casting period. The twist of the scalpel is that you’ll only want to spend half your points per turn, because draining the bar triggers Overburst, doubling the wait till your Daughter can act again. Given that some foes are nippy enough to act twice in that time, this is dangerous: if there are threats nearby and all your Daughters go into Overburst at once, it may cost you the match. You can’t always hoard those action points, however, because your Daughters are invariably outnumbered, and you may need to be aggressive.
The solution is to send some Daughters off on killing sprees while holding others in reserve, but the odds are ever-changing, with new opponents erupting from pools of white maggots around the map. You never quite know what you’re up against ’til it’s breathing down your neck. It fosters a wonderful tug-of-war between temptation to overreach and temptation to knuckle down. Killing foes also releases stray fragments of the Mother’s past, which form a chronicle of the centuries preceding the cataclysm. These troubled recollections double as ability modifiers, allowing you to, say, strip away an enemy’s armour or halve their movement range with a hail of bullets.
The timeline is remorseless, but it can be meddled with using class abilities – pounding enemies as the
Shieldbearer to slow them down, or hastening allies as the pistol-toting Soulslinger. Reaction abilities, meanwhile, allow you to exert some agency outside your turn. The Blademaster’s Immovable Stance punishes any foe who stops within swinging distance, allowing her to mince Conga lines of skirmishers providing you guess their route correctly. Blacksmith’s Grace, meanwhile, accelerates and fortifies its caster for every blow received. Perhaps the most useful class skill is the Soulslinger’s Intercepting Round, which parries a single attack on an ally – immensely helpful against bosses who can obliterate your Daughters with a word and a gesture.
Stances don’t cost action points, meaning they exist outside the game’s gruelling execution of time. Instead, they cost health. This is problematic, because Daughters can’t be patched up by conventional means. Rather, you must sacrifice one to another of the same or lower level between battles, engorging her lifeforce with the victim’s soul. This puts a macabre spin on the familiar XCOM gambit of training up two squads in parallel, one of which may ultimately prove to be spare parts for the other.
Othercide’s regular battles get a little repetitive: the mode selection consists of hunts, wave survival, escort quests and races against the clock – but the cleverness of the enemy design keeps you coming back. Creatures have distinct engagement criteria, one preferring to target the Daughter who is furthest away, another focusing on any Daughter in combat: fighting them is more of a puzzle than an exercise in attrition. Boss battles, meanwhile, are overwhelming, redolent of Dark Souls at its grandest. Our favourite is the Maid, a tapering embodiment of grief who shuffles her Reaction abilities continually, sometimes parrying projectiles and sometimes melee attacks, sometimes growing tougher when struck and sometimes healing herself whenever you move.
If these bosses will likely end your game the first time you bump into them, Othercide isn’t merciless. The monochrome aesthetic veils a generous safety net of slowly unlocking campaign modifiers, activated between playthroughs with shards acquired alongside regular XP. These include the option to skip Ages you’ve completed and start Daughters at a higher level, lessening the grind. Slain Daughters also persist between runs, waiting to be dredged from the waters of the cemetery.
Sadly, Othercide’s wintry charm is tarnished by quality-of-life issues. The fonts are agonisingly small on a 1080p display, the engagingly oblique writing is spoiled by repeated voice lines, and the HUD is missing a few tricks. You can only display an enemy’s move range when they’re selected on the timeline, and there’s no option to display all move ranges at once, which makes positioning fussy. Shortcomings aside, this is a captivatingly bleak addition to a testing genre. The Daughters may end each playthrough looking worse for wear, but it’s hard to resist taking them on another run.
One of the year’s finest grid-based strategy games, a steely and engrossing work of calculation