Stories from the Outbreak

I've been playing since early access and I fell in love with this latvian zombie turn-based rougelike rpg from the first demo I played <3 I'm a bit of an addict, but I believe the game's rougelike loops are what keep me coming back, because the different synergies between characters make each run feel very distinct One thing that i don't particularly like is the asking price, which makes me not recommend as often as I do, however definitely get it on sale! I highly recommend it!! (Paldies par burvīgo spēli <3)

Darkest Dungeon inspired game but with a map akin to Slay the Spire. All wrapped up in a zombie apocalypse in Latvia theme. Good for anyone that wants to get into this type of game but doesn't want to be completely wrecked =P Runs take 2-3 hours to complete. Fairly long for a run-based game, but nothing enormous, (not like smashing your way through Darkest Dungeon for 50 hours lol.) You occasionally get dialog options between your team members which can buff one or more of them if chosen well. I've played through it two times and while there is still quite a bit to unlock in it, I find it too easy. As someone that never managed to beat Darkest Dungeon even on easy mode this game is just way easier for good and for bad. Two runs, two wins. Yet I see some other reviews complaining about it being too hard, I guess that's from people that don't usually play this type of game. Choose your own adventure style events almost always tell you what the results of an action will be before you choose it, (or the chances for a positive outcome based on your character's stats for things requiring those,) and I never had any trouble making good synergies between character abilities no matter which lineup I was handed. Pros: Great graphics, especially the backgrounds are really gorgeous and varied. Position based combat, but it's not quite as important as in Darkest Dungeon, more on the level of Banners of Ruin. Nice music. Plenty of both hero and enemy variety. The writing is fine, although I personally didn't feel it added that much since the game is very gameplay focused. Cons: Too easy for someone experienced with this type of game. Once you beat a run you gain a challenge mode where you pick a challenge, beat that and you get the option to play with two challenges and so on, but the difficulty increases for most of them is just too little. You have to manually keep track of buffs and debuffs to know what sort of damage an attack will really do because when choosing it, it obviously just shows the base number, but when hovering over an enemy it really should display what it'll actually do, same with enemies targeting you. The UI for the trinket's can start overlapping your characters during battle once you get enough on certain screen settings, this makes it so you can't check status effects on characters in the back row once they're overlapped. Some of the sounds are kind of bizarre, like why does shooting an enemy with a paintball gun make the sound of a rock being dropped in water? The game has rows and columns mixed up in its terminology.

There's a good game in here. Runs can go a bit long. The gameplay loop lacks some polish. If you're really hungry for a roguelike turn-based RPG game, go for it.

Buon strategico a turni breve. Un mix tra Darkest Dungeon, Sheltered e FTL. Aggiunge al genere una meccanica originale mettendo tutte le azioni su una linea temporale, si crea quindi un livello di strategia addizionale manipolando il timing delle varie mosse. La grafica pixellosa è gradevole e gli scenari evocativi. Non aspettatevi grande longevità da questo titolo; non c'è una grande varietà di nemici ma quelli presenti sono comunque molto ben caratterizzati, anche gli eventi tendono a ripetersi nelle varie run, rimane comunque un gioco ben fatto e divertente. Sicuramente consigliato.

Refunded. Well, I did just play it until a few fights after killing the dogmaster, and it was seriously boring, but that's on me. Combat was good, very tactical, you could literally kill anything with statuses like bleed or poison, but then, it was linear as hell. One thing I never liked on any game, you choose the lower path and that's it, no way to go back to the previous selection, no way to just "wait" where you're at, even if you're starved or don't have food/fuel. Maybe that's an option that opens up later in the game but it makes no sense to be that linear without that small part of agency on an RPG. The permadeath is good, as expected but aside from that my main gripe is how linear it is, and all that in 30 minutes, YEAH.

It's honestly just a solid game overall, there is not much to say. The writing is good. Combat is fair. It may not be for lore junkies due to the time it takes to get the whole story and each characters life and back story but its a genuine solid game.

Good difficulty keeps you engaged, but not sweating your nuts off. The story is fine, the characters are my personal favorite part of this game. Is it some A+ new age The Last of Us or Walking Dead? No, it doesnt need to be when it's 10$ on sale. But when it's not on sale? I'd honestly say skip. It's a good game but times are hard these days and not everyone can drop 20$ on a game like this and thats perfectly okay. The devs made a good game at a fair price, nuff said!

Big no on this one, folks. Played it for a bit under 30 minutes and am refunding already. The gameplay is very repetitive and the mechanics are not very deep. The combat has too many unnecessary sounds, the characters "Swoosh!" over to the enemy formation to attack them "Swoosh!" back after they swing. The victory sound gets repetitive and annoying very quickly. I wish people who made tactical games like this would put more time and effort into making fun and interesting game mechanics that are also balanced and not so shallow. The bulk of the UI looks terrible, parts of it look like they're off screen when they pop up, and mouse clicks on certain buttons don't register. You have to manually click on each individual reward after a fight for no reason whatsoever and those buttons are the ones that fail to register mouse clicks the most often. What little of the writing I saw was pretty poor and for a game that has the word stories in the title I expected better.