Pendragon - narrative turn-based strategy from Heaven’s Vault, Sorcery! devs

[LESS T_T]

https://www.inklestudios.com/pendragon/




https://af.gog.com/game/pendragon?as=1649904300

Inkle's experiment on intertwining narrative and gameplay goes tactical.

AD 673. Camelot has fallen. The jealous Sir Mordred has broken the fellowship of the Round Table with hatred and lies. Now King Arthur faces his final battle. Who will keep the dream of Camelot alive?

Pendragon is a turn-based strategy game, where every move you make drives the narrative, and every story twist opens new gameplay opportunities.

Will you advance and show your mettle, or cautiously retreat? Will you slip round enemies, or encounter them head-on? And when sacrifices are required, who will you put in harm's way?

From the creators of the multi-award-winning 80 DAYS and Heaven’s Vault.

Rally the Knights of the Round Table. Some will make it to Camlann and King Arthur. Others will fall. But every turn will change history.

Will Sir Lancelot be reunited with Queen Guinevere? Will she spurn him, or embrace him? Will Sir Kay ever forgive Sir Gawaine for siding with Sir Mordred? Can Morgana le Fay be trusted? Where is Merlyn? Who lies buried in Mordred’s graveyard? Who is the archer in the woods? What has become of Excalibur?

Secrets will be uncovered. Hearts will be broken. People will die. But maybe, just maybe, King Arthur can be saved...

• Journey across Dark Ages Britain to face wild creatures, brutal rogues, and Sir Mordred’s dark knights. A randomized game board ensures every playthrough is new.
  
• Fight turn-based battles with simple yet deeply strategic combat where position is everything, losses are inevitable, and every step permanently shapes the narrative.
  
• Experience story and gameplay as one: Pendragon’s story plays out on the field of battle itself, driven by your decisions - and those of your enemies.

• Choose a character to lead the adventure. Their personality will shape the story: Morgana le Fay is treacherous; Queen Guinevere is haunted by her mistakes; Sir Lancelot is French; Sir Gawaine is usually drunk...
  
• Assemble a ragtag band of knights, heroes, and peasants whose dispositions and abilities grow and change with the story.
  
• Live the legend: there will be love, suspicion, revenge, sacrifice and murder — and no one is safe, not even your leader.
  
• Determine the fate of the kingdom: your actions determine whether Arthur faces Mordred alone or with his friends by his side.

Powered by the ink engine, the narrative technology behind Heaven’s Vault, Sorcery!, 80 Days, NeoCab, Sable, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine and many more, Pendragon is a digital storytelling board game of elegance, emotion, and infinite possibility.

 

[Xamenos]

Why is Guinevere such a bitch-faced fatass? Wasn't she supposed to be beautiful?

 

[jac8awol]

Morgana le Fay is treacherous; Queen Guinevere is haunted by her mistakes; Sir Lancelot is French; Sir Gawaine is usually drunk...
Ok I approve the humour, but the art looks like Tyranny and the Banner Saga had a red-headed bastard child that fell in a latrine.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

 

[Cromwell]

Why is Guinevere such a bitch-faced fatass? Wasn't she supposed to be beautiful?

because being black was already reserved for elaine and somebody had to be the token fatty.

 

[Tigranes]

Camelot, turn-base, and some kind of C&C? I'm in.

Artstyle looks poor generally, but eh since when is that the biggest deal

 

[mondblut]

Why is Guinevere such a bitch-faced fatass? Wasn't she supposed to be beautiful?

It's 2020.

Also, a black woman is a THIEF? HOW DARE YOU?!?!

 

[JarlFrank]

I enjoyed Heaven's Vault, so this might end up being decent.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Mortmal]

Create a new subforum for phone games, they may be on pc that's not true pc gaming.

 

[Infinitron]

Steam demo is out.

 

[Lemming42]

Heaven's Vault was really unique so anything that team makes is worth a look. Fuck Arthurian legend though, most boring shit ever.

 

[Haba]

Every time I read the title as "Penisdragon".

Every time I am disappointed.

 

[Infinitron]

Coming September 22nd.

 

[Silva]

Looks shit.

 

[MRY]

Has giant rats. Is RPG. Wrong forum.

 

[a Goat]

NARRATIVE




FUCK off

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/20...the-key-to-making-its-replayable-story-click/

Inkle on Pendragon: how being evil was the key to making its replayable story click

Turn-based Arthurian legend game Pendragon is the next game from Inkle Studios of Heaven’s Vault and 80 Days. RPS chatted with narrative director Jon Ingold at PAX X EGX about its replayable story that—spoiler alert—always ends with a deadly battle between King Arthur and Sir Mordred, and how playing as a villain helped keep the story from going stale over the course of multiple re-tellings.

Ingold says that Inkle was looking for ways to fit a story to their new turn-based strategy game without players getting sick of reliving the same plot again and again.

“I had a breakthrough when I suddenly realized something that’s actually really obvious about Arthurian legends which is that I’ve read [them] hundreds and hundreds of times in different tellings,” Ingold says. As Katharine points out earlier in the interview, we’re not short on round table stories at the moment, which is to say nothing of all the versions that have come before. Upcoming film The Green Knight is one part of the legend, and heck, so is Monty Python And The Holy Grail, isn’t it? Pendragon isn’t just one single new retelling of the legend, Ingold says. It’s a bunch of them all packaged together.

“Instead of making Pendragon the story of the fall of Arthur, it’s a machine for retelling the story of the fall of Arthur,” Ingold says. Each playthrough can include different characters and their resulting adventures. “You get different angles on it every time you play it and all the little bits of narrative kind of add together so you do get a greater sense of the story the more that you play because you see more aspects of it.”

It especially began to come together, Ingold says, when Inkle realized that an essential part of the storytelling was the motivations and dispositions of various characters. “The moment of realisation for us was when I had a game where you were playing as Guinevere—I think she was the first character that we put in the game because we liked that start of Guinevere going off to find Arthur, that felt romantic and epic—and then the idea of having Morgana Le Fey, who’s like the evil witch and very much the villain of the Arthurian legends, being a playable character, who’s just really mean, all the time, to everyone, and is constantly nasty, and that just reframes almost everything that she says and does.”

“We realised that this idea of an unlockable roster of heroes gave us a nice game structure, because you could unlock heroes on one run and then play with them on the next run, but it also gave us lots of interesting ways to change up how the game feels to play.”

Inkle aren’t the first to tackle a repeatable story, of course. The way Ingold describes Inkle’s goals sounds a bit like the replayable retelling of Hamlet in Elsinore, which has Ophelia returning to the same tragic story again and again to push it in new permutations. Unlockable characters remind me of Nerail’s Reigns: Game Of Thrones that puts various characters on the iron throne until they meet one of many possible grim fates. At a meta level, it’s quite neat to see replayable stories themselves going through various iterations as different studios take slightly different strategies.

You can hear more about Pendrgon’s development in RPS’s EGX interview above and catch other show info on the PAX X EGX site.

Pendragon launches next Tuesday, September 22nd. You can find it on Steam and GOG.

 

[Infinitron]

Ah this is out.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-09-11-pendragon-review-an-arthurian-legend-of-its-own

Pendragon review - an Arthurian legend of its own
Gawain somewhere?

A new classic of narrative and strategy, and a game with plenty of space for the player to enjoy themselves.


I only really understood Pendragon after I nearly lost it all. All the heroes I banked my hopes on had died. Lancelot, Morgana le Fey, Aonghas, Gawaine: all dead. How would I save King Arthur now? My story had fallen apart. But instead of giving up, I carried on.

Heaven's Vault and the Sorcery! adaptations - games which offer playful, nuanced spins on interactive fiction. Pendragon, in essence, is a roguelike in which you're riding to help King Arthur as he prepares for a climactic battle, and you play it on a series of tiled boards strung across a series of maps, each taking place in a different location and moving the narrative onwards.

You start by selecting a character from Arthurian legend to play as. Guinevere and Lancelot are available from the outset, and every hero has their own starting place and motivation for riding to Arthur's aid. Who you can choose to kick off with depends not on XP gained or shop upgrades, but on who you have met in previous playthroughs. Like the myths it builds on, Pendragon's stories get richer in the retelling.

There are two aspects to the flow of the game. One is the map, in which you plot your course across Britain as you hunt for Arthur's final battleground. The other are the scenarios (the tiled board games) that allow the story to unfold.

The map is for fundamental decisions: where to go next. Waypoints will appear as you adventure onwards and you will need to decide whether you want to go to keeps, villages, woods or ruins, each with their own possible pitfalls. Food is another consideration. Run out of rations and, when you sleep, you will lose morale and a heart of health.

The scenarios are about individual encounters. On the tiled boards, characters both friend and foe generally move one space at a time, either linearly (up, down, left, right) or diagonally, but they can only defeat another character while in linear mode - one piece sliding onto another's space. Characters can switch between linear and diagonal modes, but doing so takes a turn, which is important because a lot can happen in a turn. Winning a scenario involves either clearing a board of enemies or getting to an end-tile on the other side. It's chess, but it's also American Football.

That is Pendragon at its simplest, but there are additional layers that complicate it. There are raised tiles which allow you to move off of them in either mode, which is powerful, and there are different characters with different abilities which alter the normal rhythm of things. It's also very important how you colour a board by walking across tiles, because your characters will move more freely, and be able to attack more aggressively, from your own colour. Morale is very important too.

Morale is important because there are occasions in Pendragon where you will not want to fight. This might be because you're talking to a potential ally and are waiting for dialogue to unfold, turn by turn, or because you're in a tactical deadlock and don't want to give any ground. One wrong move can be devastating in Pendragon. There's always a chance the enemy's collective nerve will buckle and they flee, but then again, so might yours. It's morale that governs this. It's a kind of timer which depletes the longer you're in play. Let it drop too low you will be forced to flee, leaving any downed allies to die, and forfeiting any choice over what scenario you will end up in next.

Spoiler

I hope you're beginning to see that Pendragon is more than it initially seems to be. I remember my misplaced concern after I reached the end of it on my first go. I was Guinevere and it took me about an hour, probably less, to get to Arthur. I didn't defeat Mordred but I remember thinking, 'Was that it?'

Was that it? Theoretically, I'd reached the end, but to suggest I had appreciated everything Pendragon had to offer would be absurd. The beauty of Pendragon comes out in the learning. Now when I look at a scenario I see so much more. I see tactics in play, I see weaknesses and opportunities and danger. But all this I had to slowly learn on subsequent playthroughs. It's not the new things you acquire with each run, but actual knowledge and skill you start to pick up. It's why I'm being deliberately vague about how things work now because I want you to figure them out for yourself. That is the game.

Mordred turned out to be a great leveller. Yes you can reach him within an hour, but it would go on to take me 10 more before I defeated him, and that wasn't on the game's harder difficulties. And in the cycle of trying again and again, I discovered storytelling.

Again, to begin with, storytelling seemed bizarrely absent, given inkle's other story-rich games. There was the bolted-down story of Arthur facing Mordred, but I didn't seem to have much effect on it. All I seemed to be doing was going along with it. Characters would say things, and there was some scene setting and light narration, but to me it all looked like fluff and flavour. Bit by bit, though, it began piling up.

Pendragon is clever. And it's clever with thrift. Characters only seem to tell you important information and never in more than a sentence or two, and yet, within those boundaries, a lot can be delivered. "Damnit Arthur, I wish I'd never met you," says Sir Gawaine to himself. Then, "With your justice and your peace and your happy little laugh." So much evoked with so little.

It's the same with narration. It's not always there but occasionally it pops up to accentuate a scene. You can trigger it simply by moving. I moved Gawaine against a wolf and an invisible narrator told me: "A second spectral wolf paces forward... Unaware that it has emerged into Sir Gawaine's path..." Then, when I moved Aonghas: "Sir Aonghas moved like the seasons, like the tide. Nothing could turn him aside." It's like having a personal poet.

Cleverer still is how Pendragon uses story and dialogue to govern character abilities. A box will appear at a poignant moment with a big "Story Changed!" or "Core Story!" alert and usually a choice of special ability for the character. Does Guinevere love Arthur? Her answer will dictate her ability. Or take my heroic villager Aida: she got an ability because, and I quote, "I went to the edge... but I survived!" Yes, she most certainly did.

In fact, one of the most failsafe and interesting ways to shake the story up, and alter the narrative bonds between characters, is by nearly dying - lucky, really, given how punishing Pendragon can be. Should one character save another from death, they'll almost certainly see one another in a different light afterwards, and maybe you'll benefit mechanically too. And you'll never care more about a character than when their staying alive is the only thing between you and defeat, let me tell you.

I think this is the game's way of saying, "Hey don't worry about a perfect run. Enjoy the twists and turns. We'll write a more interesting story around you because of it." And everything I've seen seems to bear this out: the way a new knight will suddenly appear to join you when you're about to give up; the way a villager like Aida can fly into a rage and save you in the most dire of situations. Everywhere the invisible hand of inkle, nudging the story in an interesting way.

I haven't even talked about the beautiful stained glass appearance or the wonderful way Britain is condensed into camel-like humpy hills. Nor have I mentioned the gorgeous musical score or the powerful restraint with which it underscores a scene, like how an enemy will appear accompanied by the foreboding sound of a single, low, piano note, echoing the change in mood.

Pendragon seems to reveal its mechanics in a glance or two, but this is actually a game to be learned slowly, a story that grows richer over time and retelling. The tiled maps and the spare text are merely the surface of it, and every layer deeper you descend is a delight.

https://www.pcgamer.com/pendragon-review/

PENDRAGON REVIEW
You never know what's going to happen next in this narrative/strategy hybrid.

I've lost count of how many endings I've seen in Pendragon, the latest game from 80 Days creator Inkle. Your primary goal is always the same: gather a party of warriors and reach the battlefield of Camlann to help King Arthur defeat his nemesis, the evil Mordred. But what happens on the dangerous, winding road leading to this fateful encounter is different every time. The characters you meet, the places you explore, and the enemies you run into are heavily randomised, which makes for an excitingly dynamic and unpredictable storytelling experience—albeit one that occasionally punishes you with a sudden and unsatisfying finale.

Pendragon is a narrative roguelike based on Arthurian legend. Some knowledge of the mythology will help you navigate the story, as I had very little and felt like the game could have done a better job of leading me into its world. The story begins after the breaking of the fabled Round Table. Camelot has fallen and Arthur's allies have scattered, leaving him to face Mordred at Camlann alone. And that's where you come in. You pick one of several playable characters—Guinevere and Lancelot are available to begin with, but more can be unlocked—and embark on a quest across Britain to aid him.

But here's the thing: you're gonna fail, a lot. You'll repeatedly die on the road to Camlann, sometimes only a short while into your journey. Then when you finally do battle your way there, one of Mordred's powerful knights might just coldly strike you down. But defeat in Pendragon never feels like a game over; it's more like the last page of a particularly grim storybook. You close it, pick another from the shelf, blow the dust off the cover, and hope Arthur's pals are more successful in this one. Failure can be frustrating in Pendragon, but the path taken to that failure is almost always interesting.

This marks something of a departure from Inkle's previous work in that it's a turn-based strategy game. The game is made up of a series of gridded boards, presented as ruined castles, shadowy forests, and ancient standing stones, reaching the end of which moves you ever closer to your final destination. Sometimes you'll be able to travel across a board unchallenged, encountering a recruitable ally, a talkative villager, or a moment of evocative world-building. But often there are enemies in your way, be they territorial wolves or loyal soldiers of Mordred. As you move you 'paint' the board, taking ownership of any squares you touch, which lets you move faster on them.

What I like about Pendragon is how there's no real separation between the strategy and the story. The plot unfolds naturally on the board as you move and fight. A heroic sacrifice or a sudden death can have a profound impact on another character, unlocking one of the game's many special moves, such as charging across water tiles, jumping over blocked squares, or killing multiple enemies in a line. But I'd be lying if I said every story was compelling. My party being ambushed and unceremoniously killed by giant snakes in a boggy marsh is not exactly the stuff of legends and campfire stories. Pendragon can be punishing, even on the lowest difficulty setting.

Occasionally you'll bump into people who become playable characters, whether it's the cruel witch Morgana le Fay or the boorish Sir Kay. Your choice of character colours the narrative, each having a distinctive personality and way of speaking. Some also have unique powers, such as Morgana's ability to briefly tame wild animals. The starting board for each hero is always the same, establishing their place in the world and motivation for journeying to Camlann. But after that, the randomiser takes over and you're never quite sure what twists and turns the story will take on the long road ahead.

Compared to the lavishly descriptive 80 Days, Pendragon is sparsely written, with short bursts of economical dialogue. Which, honestly, I found a little disappointing at first. But over time I came to accept that its greatest storytelling tool isn't its prose, but its systems and how they interact. This is by far Inkle's most replayable game. Every story, even if it isn't a particularly good one, is wildly different. As a strategy game it's pretty pared down, but the way it seamlessly combines narrative and play is expertly done. The legend of King Arthur has been told and retold countless times before, but never quite like this.

THE VERDICT
78

PENDRAGON
An accessible strategy game tied to a powerful, dynamic story generator.

 

[Thac0]

Is this a PC exclusive game made by ex mobile people or phone and pc multiplatform? The latter are obviously not worth a glance, but the former can be ok.

 

[J1M]

Tried this. It is very pretentious.

Did not appreciate having to literally choose between a whore and a traitor at the character select screen.

Before I deleted it I concluded the combat was obtuse, not deep.

 

[fantadomat]

Tried this. It is very pretentious.

Did not appreciate having to literally choose between a whore and a traitor at the character select screen.

Before I deleted it I concluded the combat was obtuse, not deep.

So which one did you chose?

 

[Urthor]

Game devs absolute spitting out Roguelikes because they can have you play the same level 100x and charge you full price for a single level and some metagaming +5% mumbo jumbo

 

[J1M]

Tried this. It is very pretentious.

Did not appreciate having to literally choose between a whore and a traitor at the character select screen.

Before I deleted it I concluded the combat was obtuse, not deep.

So which one did you chose?

The whore because they were equally off-putting, but she had a spear and I think spears should be more prominent in games.

Was expecting the ability to attack diagonally or with reach.

No such luck.

 

[Iluvcheezcake]

Looks shit. Seems shit.