Othercide is sleek, stylish, and bleak as hell. You are The Mother (it’s also pretentious as hell but it owns it!), relentlessly feeding your doomed Daughters into the meat grinder to, hopefully, gain a bit of advantage for your next headlong charge at The Other. It’s as pretentious as it sounds, which is great, and it’s all black and white with a few bits of color.
Othercide
Developer: Lightbulb Crew
Price: $35 USD
Platform: PC (reviewed), PS4, Xbox One
MonsterVine was supplied with Steam code for review
Othercide styles itself a turn-based tactical roguelike, which means you’re going to lose a lot and fight across random maps until you unlock enough things–abilities, currency to spawn more daughters, and so forth–to power through that chunk of the game. It’s all about grinding for levels and experience and currency, taking battles you may lose just for the rewards down the road, and knowing the boss fight at the end is hopeless.
The splashes of color come–metaphorically as well as literally–in the form of your Daughters. Rather than hulking brutes with assault rifles, they’re stylized girls drawing their look and feel from anime, down to the wide eyes, the melodramatic swooshing of swords and cocking of guns, and the swooping all over the battlefield rather than running. There’s a hint of red in their outfits and, of course, the red blood. Oh, god, so much blood.
The meat of the game is combat and…actually, it’s not all that meaty or hard early on, because of the meat grinder. There are three classes to start with–basically offensive melee, defense melee, and ranged–and they have a few abilities, and they die too fast to really be leveled up. Oh, and there’s a catch. There’s no healing. None. Instead, to heal a Daughter, you must sacrifice a Daughter of equal or greater level, which means all the squad/team management, but ruthlessly culling the weak to feed the strong.
You have to endure the first several hours of the game before the combat system really shines and normally I don’t put up with that, but in this case I was compelled by the aesthetic and storytelling. Think Sucker Punch by way of The Crow with the creature design from, oh, Dark City. It would’ve made a hell of a 90s cult movie and my teenage self would’ve adored it.
Once you get a few runs in and have some abilities unlocked and banked, that’s when Othercide really begins to shine. Everything keys off a timeline/initiative system and each unit has Action Points they can spend during their turn. However, spend too many Action Points and you go to the back of the line, which means waiting for everyone else to do their thing. On the other hand, many abilities and skills mess with the timeline, forcing a unit to delay their action or only triggering after a set number of turns.
Everything interlocks after that: You may use one skill to delay an enemy a few ticks, then have another fire before they can react. Or you can gamble on a skill that hits hard as hell…but not yet, a few beats down the road. And if you’re really feeling lucky, some don’t use action points, but consume a chunk of your Daughter’s hitpoints to react, a sacrifice bought in blood (but may really be worth it).
The key to the unit management is balancing the literal sacrifices against the hard road to come: keep your barely alive fighter going for one more run or shove her off a cliff to power up your shiny new one? Risk the A squad or trust the B squad? Is it worth trying to fight more or do we just flatten and start the run over?
The plague doctors, creepy surgeons, and Giger-style grotesques on the other side also have their own skill sets and the AI is competent at using buffs and skills and knocking your precious setups askew. The downside is that, honestly, this game is really about doing runs and repeating them until your Daughters can just steamroll everything. There’s facing and backstabs you can use if you want to be clever or slick, but it’s easier to just grind everyone into paste and try again.
Othercide breaks down into chapters and the challenges grow as you play, though there’s something of a “gate” at the end in terms of a powerful boss. So it comes down to grinding on a chapter and then restarting until you can power through the boss. It is undeniably satisfying to go from fragile Daughters that get wiped out really easily to badasses that can single-handedly clear a map. But on the other hand…
That’s where it stumbles: Othercide can’t decide if it wants to be a hardcore roguelike with a cool story and aesthetic or if it wants to be a cool story and aesthetic wrapped around a turn-based tactical roguelike.
The combat works well together, but it’s not that deep (there’s little in the way of cover, for example, so you won’t be hiding behind features or calculating whether you want to break cover). The Daughter progression is interesting and varies…but not that varied in that there are only a few classes. The maps are random enough to provide a challenge over time, but not random enough to be interesting over that long. The enemies are varied, but there are only a relative few of them. Darkest Dungeon used the grind itself as part of the story and Othercide tries that, but the rest of the assets don’t support it.
It feels like an artsy, short-ish game taken over by a producer that said, “You know what the kids like? Hard games. It’s what’s in!”, so there’s more grinding than maybe there ought to be, and the story goes from depressing and sad to literally rubbing your face in it. I mentioned Sucker Punch above and that’s actually a good comparison: it’s stylish enough to be interesting, but it’s really not all that deep. And obviously, if you need a pick-me-up in these grimdark days, this ain’t it, chief.
I’ll give it a compliment, though: If they made a DLC with more story, more classes, and more variety, I’d check it out. I’m willing to buy what it’s selling, I just need a little more to it to give it full marks. Great effort, though.
The Final Word
Relentlessly stylish and relentlessly grindy turn-based tactical roguelike.
– MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good
