i was really impressed by this one. it’s a solo dev tactics game that’s in direct conversation with fft and larian but is very tightly paced, thoughtfully designed in every respect, and is the first game ive played in forever that’s done something genuinely fresh with the metroidvania format (but idk how to write about that last bit without overselling or spoiling it a little)
the battles are complex but the complexity is so well-considered that it feels simple, if that makes sense. a combination of good ux and cutting away other mental overhead (e.g. almost everyone moves the same distance in a turn, which i really learned to appreciate). i loved throwing down caltrops before triggering a fight to create my own chokepoints, or shoving an enemy off a tile where a healing spell was going to go off so i could take the healing for myself. skill lists are small and i loved how my assessment of every skill kept changing. there are no experience levels, which helped make my character progression feel earned. something analogous to fft class stat growths is here but it’s not just for sickos anymore…
had you played the previous rad codex games? people seem to really like them but I could never tell which entry point was worth it and this one looks grimmer than the others
Looks neat enough, but the visual design feels difficult to parse based on the screenshots. Particularly the spritework and lack of color contrast. Does it work better in game?
i haven’t, but i might. this one’s the nicest to look at and i already liked the composer and those both did a lot to sway me.
it’s slightly less grim than tactics ogre imo, though you can be Bioware Evil if you want. i did not do that.
i found things easy to parse in practice but ymmv. sometimes i had one of my mages carry a torch around, but that’s just responsible if you’re getting killed in a mine
well i grabbed horizon’s gate on sale today and dumped a few hours into it, it’s definitely bigger but i think that mostly works against it
the individual areas in kingsvein are pretty memorable, horizon’s gate is trying to be Daggerfall, down to going to job boards to kill monsters in anonymous caves for 500 gold. i end up spending less time in battle and more time interacting with a trading system that amounts to fetch questing. the game wants you to ally with one of three countries but doesn’t really make an effort to sell the choice narratively afaict. just a series of systems where i keep going “why is this here.” maybe i’m a hater idk
my party is a bunch of guys i hired in random taverns who don’t have anything to say, which feels like a step down from kingsvein where i could build my party however i wanted but they were still people with stuff to say and a role in the narrative
the larger class tree is pretty funny for sheer bravado but there are many more junk skills to fill the space, whereas with most of the skills in kingsvein felt like you could build a whole character around them. harder to get excited about the classes when they have one or two cool skills each
i did think it was funny that they were systems-brained enough that they ended up having to write flavortext for inspecting every piece of clutter. like caves of qud but, uh, without the dedicated writer
kv has the same system, idk why it stood out to me less there. i guess partly the fact that horizon’s gate actively incentivizes you to fill your journal out as one of its progression systems. if youre looking at tables in kv then that’s your problem. id have to go back and look but i’d also guess that taking place in one little corner of the world instead of Everywhere let the entries be a little more tailored to the setting than “this is a chair for sitting on”
