Ruin Explorer
Legend
New year new thread!
What videogames are you playing to escape The Horrors this year?
For the very first time I can, to my own shock, recommend what is technically a gacha game, Limbus Company.
This is a very strange, very literary like TRPG/VN hybrid (a genre we are admittedly seeing more often these days, c.f. Hundred Line etc.). You're a man with no memory, whose head has been replaced by a clock, put in charge of 12 "Sinners", who are all named after and somewhat resemble literary characters (including Heathcliff, Odysseus, Gregor Samsa, Faust, Don Quixote and others), half of them gender-swapped because the originals are all male (or in one case, don't really have a gender). Your name is Dante and you are being bossed around by a mean guy named Virgilius (and the map is called "Inferno", this ain't excessively subtle). You drive around in a magic bus that eats people and the bus driver is called Charon.
Interestingly three of the Sinners are from books I wasn't really aware of, but are major literary works in Japan, Korean, and China respectively (I had sort of heard of the Chinese one).
Also all the "Sinners" can draw on sort of "alternate history" versions of themselves, called Identities, (which is where the gacha element comes in).
The setting is a massive dream-like dystopian city half-ruled by various corporations. The tone is definitely closest to things like Rowan Rook and Deckard's Spire and Heart TTRPGs (and also to a lot of weirder modern RPGs, like Electric Bastionland), indeed it has a fair amount in common with Spire particularly.
The artwork is really lovely and moody, most related visually to maybe Darkest Dungeon in battles but also to stuff like Wildermyth (which also has some tonal similarities, and actually sometimes similar music).
Pulling up on a certain literary location. Probably not the one you'd immediately think!
One of the interstitials - they're done in a cool style which gets a bit more refined as the game goes on (this is an early one) but always has a tonne of energy
One of the Identities, too-old-for-this-s**t and depressed cyberpunk corporate kill team leader version of gender-swapped Odysseus (yes she is my favourite how did you know?).
I think a lot of people here would enjoy this quite a lot. The characters and story really get quite effective over time, with some big moments. It's kind of like reading a pretty great manga but with turn-based battles as you go. The gacha elements are less intrusive/offensive than any other game I've seen by a country mile - it's definitely worth picking up the season pass (I think $13 and a season lasts a quarter of the year as would make sense - unlike some games where it's more like 6 weeks or w/e) but that's basically all. It's essentially single-player, note - the only "MP" element is you can borrow characters from friends if you want.
The same company, ProjectMoon did the previous offline games Lobotomy Corporation and Library of Ruina, though I've only played the latter (it's very cool if very strange, and is referenced a fair bit by this game, but nothing you actually need to know), which are also set in the same universe (though don't feature literary characters AFAIK).
On a design note, what Limbus Company manages to do with the Identities is very clever - pretty much every other gacha has a terrible story because it has gigantic and ever-growing cast, so can't really focus on them much. But because we have this fixed cast of essentially 15 characters (plus a lot of recurring ones), who merely put on "Identities" for battle, and it's the Identities which are randomly obtained, that problem is just completely bypassed. The story is really strong, like actually made me think, made me feel things (not normal for any videogame), hitting its stride when we get to the Ishmael (from Moby Dick) focused part, which is pretty intense.
What videogames are you playing to escape The Horrors this year?
For the very first time I can, to my own shock, recommend what is technically a gacha game, Limbus Company.
This is a very strange, very literary like TRPG/VN hybrid (a genre we are admittedly seeing more often these days, c.f. Hundred Line etc.). You're a man with no memory, whose head has been replaced by a clock, put in charge of 12 "Sinners", who are all named after and somewhat resemble literary characters (including Heathcliff, Odysseus, Gregor Samsa, Faust, Don Quixote and others), half of them gender-swapped because the originals are all male (or in one case, don't really have a gender). Your name is Dante and you are being bossed around by a mean guy named Virgilius (and the map is called "Inferno", this ain't excessively subtle). You drive around in a magic bus that eats people and the bus driver is called Charon.
Interestingly three of the Sinners are from books I wasn't really aware of, but are major literary works in Japan, Korean, and China respectively (I had sort of heard of the Chinese one).
Also all the "Sinners" can draw on sort of "alternate history" versions of themselves, called Identities, (which is where the gacha element comes in).
The setting is a massive dream-like dystopian city half-ruled by various corporations. The tone is definitely closest to things like Rowan Rook and Deckard's Spire and Heart TTRPGs (and also to a lot of weirder modern RPGs, like Electric Bastionland), indeed it has a fair amount in common with Spire particularly.
The artwork is really lovely and moody, most related visually to maybe Darkest Dungeon in battles but also to stuff like Wildermyth (which also has some tonal similarities, and actually sometimes similar music).
Pulling up on a certain literary location. Probably not the one you'd immediately think!
One of the interstitials - they're done in a cool style which gets a bit more refined as the game goes on (this is an early one) but always has a tonne of energy
One of the Identities, too-old-for-this-s**t and depressed cyberpunk corporate kill team leader version of gender-swapped Odysseus (yes she is my favourite how did you know?).
I think a lot of people here would enjoy this quite a lot. The characters and story really get quite effective over time, with some big moments. It's kind of like reading a pretty great manga but with turn-based battles as you go. The gacha elements are less intrusive/offensive than any other game I've seen by a country mile - it's definitely worth picking up the season pass (I think $13 and a season lasts a quarter of the year as would make sense - unlike some games where it's more like 6 weeks or w/e) but that's basically all. It's essentially single-player, note - the only "MP" element is you can borrow characters from friends if you want.
The same company, ProjectMoon did the previous offline games Lobotomy Corporation and Library of Ruina, though I've only played the latter (it's very cool if very strange, and is referenced a fair bit by this game, but nothing you actually need to know), which are also set in the same universe (though don't feature literary characters AFAIK).
On a design note, what Limbus Company manages to do with the Identities is very clever - pretty much every other gacha has a terrible story because it has gigantic and ever-growing cast, so can't really focus on them much. But because we have this fixed cast of essentially 15 characters (plus a lot of recurring ones), who merely put on "Identities" for battle, and it's the Identities which are randomly obtained, that problem is just completely bypassed. The story is really strong, like actually made me think, made me feel things (not normal for any videogame), hitting its stride when we get to the Ishmael (from Moby Dick) focused part, which is pretty intense.
