Othercide is a game I would really have loved to like. It's a stylish turn-based tactics game that weaves a lot of difficult decisions into every battle. Permanent sacrifices have to be made often, and if you're not willing to do them yourself, the enemy will force alternatives for you, often to a less desirable outcome.
Let's break it down, from the best bits to the worst bits.
The atmosphere is well Othercide's strongest point. The entire world is grayscale, with shades of red at places. Despite the limited color palette, there is complete clarity in visuals, and I absolutely love the style this creates. It fits well with the dreamlike, or rather, nightmarish, scenes and enemies, as well as the echocing voicelines thrown out every so often. Despite what I feel was a somewhat low amount of resources due to being an indie game, they could not have done a better job in this field.
Secondly, the idea was good. The game is designed not only to be very difficult, but to also force the player into difficult decisions. The unique mechanic is that your units are never able to recover health. This is further enhanced by many units having access to powerful abilities that can be cast in addition to your normal actions that turn, but there's a catch - they consume the caster's life, the resource they will not be getting back. You can try to play it perfectly by never using these abilities, but that decision may well turn on you, if you sustain greater losses otherwise.
Now, finally, where everything falls apart - the execution. By far the largest problem that you will notice again and again is that the game does not give you enough information. In a super-difficult game like this, the player needs to have the tools to make the most of their doomed situation. But the game fails to tell you very important information. How often can enemies act? How many actions can they perform per turn? You're never told they can not attack on the turn they spawn, unless they forego their movement. Further, ability descriptions, formulas, ranges, targetting information, etc. are either not shown or hidden under multiple menus. The UI feels somewhat unresponsive, which makes navigating these menus more time consuming and frustrating. The gameplay is good, but I have to make a choice between playing to the best of my abilities and spending, without exaggeration, 90% of the time on looking up details that a well-designed UI would have at the ready, or just winging my turns, and getting beat over and over.
Worth noting is that your units increase in offensive power very rapidly, allowing a single unit to do more work than 2-3 units combined. Of course, it is nigh impossible to never lose them, but the game undermines its own permadeath mechanic by handing out resurrection tokens every so often, and your dead units persisting through runs. (You also get other passive powerups to make your subsequent runs easier.) So, fail as much as you want, you can always resurrect your most powerful units early on in the next run, and eventually have enough of them that clearing anything becomes easy enough.
Overall, a great idea with a captivating atmosphere. The gameplay and balance are fine, but nothing amazing, but the user experience, namely the information shown, as well as navigating the game and the menus, are terrible, and ruin everything else. I am saddened that they did not put extra polish into these areas of increasing clarity, for this could have been a very good game. As it is now, I can not recommend it. It may feel great for the first hours as you explore what the game has to offer, but it will quickly lapse into tedium and frustration.
