Edge - UK (2020-10)

Developer Lightbulb Crew

Publisher Focus Home Interactive

Format PC, PS4 (tested),

Switch, Xbox One

Release Out now

Othercide

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.

H

ere 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 self-

division. 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

PLAY

One of the

year’s finest

grid-based

strategy games,

a steely and

engrossing work

of calculation

8

TAKE CARE

Slowly teased out over around

30 hours of play, Othercide’s

story doesn’t have much time

for nuance. It’s a squalid,

depressing tale of mistreatment

and neglect, reliant on brute

symbolism (think children

dangling in webs of barbed wire)

and voiced with occasionally

unbearable earnestness. If the

ambience and certain character

designs recall Pathologic,

another story of disease,

punishment and generational

trauma, the writing is rather

more on-the-nose. Piecing

together the Mother’s history

is enjoyable, and the sheer

grandiosity of the imagery

means that you’re seldom at

risk of taking things to heart,

but if you have personal

experience of abuse you might

want to give this a miss.