Your skills are pushed to the breaking point. You never know what you’ll be walking into, and rest assured you will wipe on the first encounter with these foes. Those aforementioned bosses are no joke, either. It’s brutal, but it suits the harsh tone of the game. Considering how tough it can be to keep Daughters alive long enough to hit higher levels, not to mention how loaded with invaluable skills they’ll be by then, you really have to commit. No farming Daughters for healing you must choose a life just as important over another. The only way to heal, you see, is to sacrifice one Daughter to heal another, and the kicker is that the sacrifice must be equal level or higher. Well, not unless you’re willing to make a small sacrifice. You can’t even heal up before the big bosses. Enemies can deal out serious damage, and there’s no healing in between combat encounters. It behooves you to take as little damage as possible in Othercide. You are the maestro, the enemies are your orchestra, and the timeline is your baton. It’s a small system, but it expands outwards in clever ways. Or perhaps you want to kill the enemies’ support unit before focusing on the attackers. You could do this to combo attack with another Daughter, and deal some serious damage. Gunning for the enemy attacking next seems smart on the surface, but maybe it’s smarter to use a skill that sets their initiative back and gives yourself a little breathing room. The game wants you to play with this mechanic constantly.

On a bar of 0-100, any Daughter or enemy can be coming up next. This timeline is ever present at the bottom of the screen, and it keeps tracks of whose turn is next.

The combat is pretty standard for tactics games, outside of the “timeline” mechanic. It makes for that in-and-out gameplay loop you want from a roguelike. There are only three classes (ranged, melee, and tank), the maps are small, and the objectives are simple. The strength of Othercide is in its simplicity. Remember when I said Othercide was poetic and esoteric? The many nouns of the games are well-explained via the in-game codex for instance Remembrances is just a flavorful way of saying “runs.” You send your Daughters to fight through Remembrances as you try to get as far into your “run” as possible. The game has you assisting The Red Mother as she seeks to rescue The Child from the clutches of The Suffering. The esoteric nature of the world itself is also enrapturing, and you never know what will come next because you’re unsure of what harrowing horrors are even possible.

Every character speaks as if they’re in some kind of tone poem, and it lends an eerie nature to all of the proceedings. The story moments are few and far between, but the almost poetic dialogue keeps you glued to the screen. The enemy designs play into the overwhelmingly melancholic atmosphere, with plague masks and demonic appendages aplenty. I won’t bother describing them here I’ll let the screenshots do the talking, but I am in constant awe while playing. The most striking thing about Othercide is its utterly entrancing visuals. The combination of tactics gameplay, sharp aesthetics, and macabre story has entranced me. The repetitive nature ruins any possible investment in narrative I could have, which is the primary reason I play. People adore this genre, but I’ve never found one for me. Anyone that listens to our show will know I can never find the fun in roguelikes.

Othercide mother