Othercide (PC, PS4, Xbox One, Switch)
by Christian Haines,
Managing Editor
Othercide (Lightbulb Crew) is what happens when the soldiers from X-COM go through a goth phase and start frequenting Hot Topic. It’s a turn-based tactics game in which you control a team of goth girls wielding oversized swords and vintage guns. You’re fighting off the advances of the Suffering: creatures that are equal parts Victorian cosplay and Lovecraftian horrors from the deep.
The game’s art style is striking, with characters and monsters sharply rendered in black and white, splashes of red flashing across the screen as you successfully execute attacks or succumb to the onslaught of the Suffering’s minions. Like last year’s XCOM: Chimera Squad, Othercide stands out from most other tactics games because it ditches earthtones and realistically-rendered animations in favor of an anime emphasis on bombastic action. When one of your squad members critically hits an enemy in Othercide, a 2D illustration of her flashes on the screen, dripping with stylized shadows.
What really distinguishes Othercide from the busy market of tactics games is that it’s a roguelite with a sacrifice mechanic. As a roguelite, the game expects you to lose – and to lose – and to lose. The first time you run through the game, you’ll almost certainly be underpowered when you reach the first boss, but as you execute new runs (“recollections”), you earn currency (“shards”) for upgrades that carry from one run to the next. Like most games in the rogue family, narrative takes a backseat to mechanics and repetition overhelms a strong sense of forward movement. Yet like the better roguelites (Supergiant’s amazing Hades, for example), tight mechanical precision produces a compelling game loop in which the player’s increasing skill is its own kind of progress.
In Othercide, death doesn’t mean an end to progression. To the contrary, the entire game revolves around profiting from your squad’s deaths. Your “daughters” (as the game refers to the Blademasters, Shieldbearers, and Soulsingers making up your team) can only be healed by sacrificing another daughter of equal or greater level. You can resurrect daughters from previous runs, though only at the cost of relatively rare tokens. You are the “mother” deciding how to spend the lives of your children, a process that involves painfully weighing one soldier’s skills and hit points against another’s.
The mechanics of Othercide ask the player for thoughtful precision, though it’s not as harsh as XCOM 2. In addition to the sacrifice mechanic, this precision comes from the game’s Dynamic Timeline System – an initiative system in which the more action points you spend performing attacks or special moves, the further you’re pushed back on the timeline and the closer you inch towards the enemies’ turns to attack. It’s not dissimilar to the timeline in Mike Bithell’s John Wick Hex. Certain attacks not only inflict damage on enemies but also delay their attacks, potentially allowing you to sneak in another attack. There’s much more to the system, including interrupts, deferred actions, and the ability to overspend action points in an effort to finish off an enemy, but the essence of the system is that every decision comes at a cost, asking you to balance risk and reward, vulnerability and victory.
There’s something like a story being told in between the game’s combat scenarios, but the narrative mostly serves as an excuse for atmosphere. What you remember from a session of the game isn’t the lore but the flashy animations, the beautiful reds and grays, and the airy yet intense soundtrack. For the most part, this works. Yes, the runs blur together and the conflict is vague and melodramatic. (One piece of flavor text reads: “The City was destroyed. The Veil, fractured. Thousands of souls perished, swallowed by the void.” What city? What void? Where’s this veil?)
And yet Othercide still works because every decision has stakes on a mechanical level and because the game slowly but steadily doles out rewards in the form of new skills and combat bonuses. During this moment of global pandemic, as time crawls forward like some amphibious creature from a Lovecraft story, it feels good to play a game in which every action counts and progress means beating back irrational hordes of monsters, all while trying to get a grip on the passage of time.
