How many buffs can a buffed buff man buff a man whose buff buffs the buffest man.
Developer: Pera Games
Price: $14.99
Platform: PC
MonsterVine was supplied with PC copy for review
Having scraped past their $65k Kickstarter goal and dodging the slings and arrows of Steam Greenlight, Overfall is perched on the final threshold of Early Access and is preparing its exodus into full release. A tactical roguelike, with a heavy emphasis on experiencing pockets of branching narrative, has Overfall feeling simultaneously unique but mechanically familiar. Although there is a caveat, how deep does their well of content go?
The opening cutscene is surprisingly one of the only moments you will glimpse the overall narrative. Acting as brief introduction to the world and its history, you discover that your two starting heroes were sent through a portal by the ever-wise Ever King only to return with a magical disc after 300 years with a horde of angry Vikings (sorry “Vorn”) on their tail. You’re then on your own, sailing the open seas and exploring islands for the encounters they hold. In contrast to the dire and dramatic opening tale, my first island was a quick nod to Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. It soon becomes apparent that these branching narrative encounters that pepper the overworld are an especially mixed bag; from taking some time to perform in a rock band, to the endless pop culture references, to the heart-wrenching sadness as you sit with a betrayed soldier while he dies.
Before you even set your eyes on the open seas, you’ll need to first customize your starting pair of characters. Albeit, your first time out the portal gates will be pretty simple as you have nothing unlocked. By completing quests in the world you will gain access to classes, abilities and trinkets to fit out your adventurers with.
There are a number of races sprawled across the map and each has their own story to tell. Not necessarily a clear contrast of good and evil, there is always a reason to question the locals motives. Completing quests can reward you with a number of resources and also diplomacy points with whichever race you helped out. Once you gain enough of these diplomacy points you unlock companion slots and more race interactions. There’s a sizable array of companions to choose from, all with different abilities and game changing strategies (I heartily recommend the Death Knight).
Combat is a glorious mess of tactics. Taking place on a hex grid, character turns consist of three stages (movement, utility and attack) each with three abilities to choose from. Here is where the wall of complexity slowly begins to topple and crush the unexpecting player. Buffs and debuffs make up the core of your strategies. With a whopping 39 conditions (19 positive, 20 negative) that can be applied to any character, each with their own effects, makes grasping the tidal wave of information a difficult task, especially for a new player. Thankfully, it more of less boils down to buff yourself as much as you can, while getting rid of any negative effects, and then whale on the enemies with an axe. The conditions are communicated by little symbols that hover above everyone’s health bar which can sometimes be a little too innocuous for my liking. The retaliation buff, for example, will deal a portion of damage taken back to the sprite that caused it. Countless times I blundered into whacking an enemy with this condition as it was camouflaged by their 6 other yellow buffs. All said and done however, I was the one at fault; it’s a turn-based game so you need to be methodical in your decisions. After every combat encounter your characters have a chance to gain permanent effects like becoming more panicky or frail, each affecting a vast array of background stats.
All of this culminates into a rather FTL-like experience. You sail around from story node to story node, doing your best to upgrade your party while avoiding the gradual attrition. As you do your best to survive the twists and turns of fate, the Vorn are taking over and conquering islands, spreading their domain over the map. The Vorn, with their Viking ships are most likely going to be your demise. A wrong turn will have them boarding your vessel and murdering you in style with their rippling muscles and long flowing hair. In fact the difficulty scales to such a point I was unable to reach the endgame at all. Countless hours of dedication are required to unlock all the classes and companions, while an unwavering grasp of all conditions and their synergies is needed to succeed in combat.
Learning these lessons is done through failure and unfortunately where Overfall suffers is in the rather shallow spread of questlines. With every new run you are bound to bump into at least 5 repeated quests in the early game. Some are short enough to quickly repeat, or you can try out different paths in the branching narrative path, but others are quite lengthy and going through them again is an absolute chore. In all fairness the sheer amount of content required to fill this open world is astronomical. Developer, Pera Games, is very much aware of this quest creation challenge and has implemented a “story builder” within the game menu itself. Here players can create any encounter they can imagine in the Overfall world and upload it directly to the Steam Workshop for others to install into their game. While this is a unique solution to the problem and an exciting prospect for those players that want to create their own stories, I am concerned that there may not be enough of a participation to warrant the system and the well of content in the default game may just run dry.
The Final Word
A fantastically unique and incredibly complex tactical roguelike that strives to push the boundaries of conventional storytelling in games. The depth of combat is immensely satisfying, however the relatively low number of questlines for an open world roguelike results in some tiring repeats.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
