Oaken
EARLY ACCESS PREVIEW
Oaken is a simple game. You play your
units out over a hexagonal grid, with each
taking one action and moving one tile per
turn. They can attack – and
counterattack – any unit in their handily
highlighted frontal arc, and placing units,
casting spells, and using skills all burns a
turn-limited resource. That’s it:
that’s the game. OK, there’s a
little more to it than that, but
it’s all supplemental to these
core fundamentals.
Across three acts, and that familiar
roguelike branching route map, Oaken
teaches you how to think about playing it.
It keeps a strong focus on satisfying
short-term tactical thinking, while
keeping long-term decisions quietly on
the backburner, and strips out a lot of the
frustration of death-by-randomisation.
A strong, simple focus shouldn’t be
mistaken for being overly easy, though. In
the first act, for instance, each level is a
race against time. After a certain number
of rounds, poisonous fog will fill the zone:
game over. Carelessly aggressive play will
only sacrifice your units, but being too
precious will let enemies overwhelm you
until that fog cloud comes.ALL BARK
You start with a small deck and can only
play each card once before it becomes
‘unstable’. Playing that card again will
exhaust it either permanently or until the
end of the act, depending on your
difficulty setting. There aren’t
opportunities to add new cards to your
deck outside of fights, so it all ties together
into an emphasis on precise, smart play.
Your health resets in each level, so each
one is about solving it correctly, not
compensating for past mistakes.
This balance isn’t perfect, and I have a
lot of early game false starts. Your build is
really defined by your first trinket – those
are boons rewarded by bosses and elites.
Before then, standard fights can be quite
swingy in terms of difficulty, and some
optional objectives (which reward you with
the Lumi Dust used to upgrade cards)
logistically impossible. Once I’d found any
kind of build, though, progress was down
to my own good or bad decisions.
The Early Access version of Oaken has
all three acts of the game playable, one
Hero, and four Guardians, which all come
with their own card and trinket pools. It’s a
playable game from start to finish,
and bugs were mostly fairly minor – I
found it fairly easy to accidentally
‘break’ level transitions (like by
checking my deck when offered a
trinket), but in all but one case, reloading
my save fixed the problem without any
loss of progress. The current plan is to add
another Hero and another world map, as
well as iron out any balance issues, in the
next five to seven months.
I wonder about that scope and
timeline – but mostly because what’s out
now is already good. I don’t know that it
needs massively expanding on so much
as refining. There are elements that could
be improved, like the tiny text and the
fact that there’s no visual indicator of
when a unit has used up its movement,
but I can see the ingredients in Oaken for
a tactics game I could pour hours into
and enjoy. Its puzzle-like approach to
level design. The sense of progression
through a build. Synergising upgrades.
Maybe it needs more time in the oven
before it’s that perfect cake, but I’m
forgiving of Oaken’s faults because I think
it’ll all turn out in the end.
Ruth CassidyI
n the words of competitive baking show
judges everywhere: if you’re going to go
for something simple, you have to
execute it perfectly. With its small
levels, tight scope, and visual polish, Oaken is – or
is on its way to be – that idealised Victoria sponge
of tactical roguelikes.
A small, sweet, and smart slice of
tactical puzzling
OAKEN
THE EARLY ACCESS VERSION
OF OAKEN HAS ALL THREE
ACTS OF THE GAME PLAYABLE
EXPET TO PAY
£16
DEVELOPER
Laki StudiosPUBLISHER
Goblinz PublishingLINK
goblinzstudio.comNEED TO KNOW
PLAYED
IT