There is a good combination of direct attack skills, interrupt skills, buffs, and more that have to be considered in order to be effective in battle. The direct tactical gameplay itself is pretty well put together, with a fair amount of intricacies without being too overwrought. You find yourself sortieing to the same maps numerous times, with maybe just a few slight differences in enemy positioning. Unfortunately, this type of battle structure does get a little bit repetitive, especially in a roguelike-styled game where you'll inevitably have to restart from the beginning more than once. Hunts task you with just taking out all the enemies on the map, Survival maps force you to simply survive long enough for a certain amount of time against waves of enemies, Rescue missions have you escorting a frail unit to a finish line, and so on. There are a few different encounter types, each with a different objective. Instead, the game allows you to pick a type of battle from a list of options. There are no real bespoke encounters or maps either. Battles are on a smaller scale compared to most other tactical RPGs, with nearly every skirmish only allowing you to bring just 2-4 units. Starting out, your Daughters can be one of three different types: a melee-focused swordswoman, a defense-focused shieldbearer, or support-focused gunslinger, with a 4th scythe-wielding class coming about half-way through the game. Don't worry, though, there are plenty of persistent elements in place which allow your team of Daughters to be more capable the next time through. This means you effectively progress as far as you can with your cast of Daughters, eventually fail, and then you reset from the beginning. However, one thing that was perhaps not immediately clear in the game's marketing up to release is that Othercide is also strongly a roguelike game. Just be aware you have to dedicate some time at first before things start to fall into place. It's certainly an interesting method to telling a story, and I did quite appreciate how it was trying to tell it. Oddly enough, some of the most elucidating bits of story info come from snippets of background information found in loading screens. What the game has instead is a mix of vague statements made by the Mother, some brief initially-confusing dialogue cutscenes, and a codex in the game's menu. There is no significant amount of plain exposition to explain what is going on in any specific sense. Othercide does not have an outwardly straightforward A-to-B type narrative. You'll learn soon enough that you are trying to save 'The Child' from something called 'Suffering', but most of this is told through enigmatic statements & murmurs more than anything else.

The Mother falls, but she can still give rise to a limitless number of Daughters to do battle for her. You take control of a character only referred to as 'The Mother', and for some reason, you are battling nightmarish creatures in a bleak city-hellscape sort of place.

And it does, to varying degrees of success.ĭon't expect the game to make a lot of sense when you first boot it up, however. I'm always on the lookout for good tactical RPGs, and this one certainly seemed it wanted to try something a little different than the usual.

With its moody monochromatic art style and red accents, it certainly lingered in my mind when I first saw it about a year ago. Othercide certainly leaves an immediately memorable first impression.

Othercide shieldbearer