For whatever reason, by engaging in the game’s outright insistence on the inevitability of failure, I found myself repeatedly plummeting into the gaping maw of death envious of what new strength my Daughters would be reborn with in their next resurrection.
At the very least, losing a run tends to feel like a bit of a kick in the shin, and it takes me a while to come back and try again. I am, not traditionally, the biggest fan of carry-over roguelikes.
#OTHERCIDE MOTHER FULL#
I should’ve been better primed for this.Īkin to roguelikes where some skill-sets or upgrades will carry over from playthrough to playthrough, a full party loss here merely restarts you at the most recent Act savepoint and restarts you with power-ups, skills, memories, attacks, and even the ability to resurrect your dead characters to keep building them up ‘til the literal ends of the Earth. Othercide is at its most pleasing when you meet it on its own terms of loss and torture.Īgain - thematic cues from Clive Barker. As an XCOM save-scummer who can’t bear to lose my soldiers, I was worried that I was setting myself up for an incredibly unpleasant experience. Othercide lets you know from the outset that you’re going to lose. You send them into battles, they level up and learn skills, and return to your warm embrace in a base location (dubbed The Void because… well, it’s certainly either in Hell or nothingness.) Your daughters learn and grow.
#OTHERCIDE MOTHER SERIES#
Oopsie-daisy! While you cannot fully resurrect, you can summon a series of Daughters as soldiers in your name. In the opening sequence, space-time ruptures because you die. In today’s odd adventure, Othercide places you in the role of The Mother: a goddess whose mission appears to be keeping the fabric of space-time from rupturing. But much like Focus Home’s takes on Cthulhu and vampires, somehow these games can lean painfully into stereotypes of the genre and still fill me with delight. There’s so much that should cause my eyes to roll out of my head. This highly stylized battler takes thematic cues from Clive Barker, visual cues from Sin City, design cues from Bloodborne, and the rest of it is draped in Hot Topic mid-aughts goth. The shortcut here is to imagine XCOM by way of a Guillermo del Toro film. Othercide is a turn-based strategy game set in a time-bending - and reality-distorting - hell world. God, they just hit this specific spot in the grooves of my brain overriding other standard critical perspectives and making me do little giggles of nightmarish joy. I didn’t even know that Othercide came from Focus, but I was already heading into my review in the first few hours name-checking those other titles. Things like Vampyr, Plague Tale: Innocence, and Call of Cthulhu are games that I know are flawed, but nonetheless stick in my craw as perhaps my favorite playable experiences of the year. That intro detail is important because this game radiates the same energy of all the Focus Home Interactive games I’ve interacted with over the past few years. Othercide comes from developer Lightbulb Crew and publisher Focus Home Interactive.
I’m still wavering on that now, but I at least have a starting place to explain what I both love and distrust about this odd release.
The more time I spent with it, the more I wasn’t sure if I should trust my own instincts. There was no huge push (I’m behind embargo by over a month) and I just got to breathe - to feel it out and make my peace with the experience. Othercide is the most time I’ve spent on a video game review in a few years.
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