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KickStarter Stirring Abyss - Lovecraftian underwater tactical RPG

Hellraiser

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Apr 22, 2007
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11,300
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Danzig, Potato-Hitman Commonwealth
I like the art-style they used for the tactical combat map and objects.

Anyway I am now stalking this thread, lurking until prestigious informed opinions on the quality of this title surface from the codexian hivemind.
 

Nortar

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Sep 5, 2017
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1,407
Pathfinder: Wrath
I've got a couple of bugs, nothing too serious, but kind of annoying.
1. After completing 2nd mission whenever I load a saved game my difficulty changes from Hard to Normal, and there's no way to change it back.
2. Between 2nd and 3rd missions the subs power did not increase by 10 points, so it was not possible to pump and fix the 2nd room.

Edit:
Some info from the discord.

1. The difficulty change is just a visual bug. Starting new mission resets difficulty display to what it should be.
2. The missing power issue happens if you load an autosave that happens right after mission completion. It's possible to get it back via console command - F3 to bring up the console, type "addresource power 10" without quotation marks.
Both issues should be fixed in the next patch.
 
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Trash Player

Scholar
Joined
Jun 13, 2015
Messages
438
Finished it on hard under 20 hours. It is pretty much a XCOM lite with a charming art style that nonetheless overstays its welcome with the very limited scope.

Movement is segmented, i.e. troops move one tile at a time for each AP, and AP is uniform rather than implicitly move-and-attack. There is a command ability system
that is thematic if mundane in function. Economy early on is tight. Clocking mechanism exists in both tactical and global forms that are rather tame in effect.
It is a plus to me that clocks exist but might not be to you. There are some text events with dice rolls influenced by character building. Troops can mutate with a rare resource
and some are rather fresh. Art style is charming but forget about the eldritch horror angle. The fauna looks silly and kinda cute for what they are. There are no game breaking
bugs I know of.

The good is not enough to keep the game fresh for its length. There is just a handful of enemies, a handful of environment tile sets, a handful of abilities for each character.
3 troops are deployable initially and only expends to 4 with upgrade. There are a whooping 3 classes of troops.
You read it right, this is a squad based tactics with a team size of 4 and 3 classes. Skill tree is randomized, a troop starts with random class skills, and then pick from a choice of 2 from both the generic and class pool for all 5 levels up. The lack of agency to build a given troop in ways player want outweighs the replayability
and uniqueness factors, imo. A given troop can easily miss some class abilities for no reason but a roll. The tech tree is uninteresting and arranged in a rather random fashion.
Economy is easily figured out with a rather rigid optimal build order. You fight the same seafood platter for the whole game and even new enemies don't really behave in novel ways that
force players to adapt. There is also an inverse difficulty curve. Granted it is the case for a lot of games but here one can engineer one by reversing the global clock immensely late game
for weaker enemies which is somewhat awkward.

It is not bad if you don't mind a small and short TB squad based game and otherwise like the premise and at least tolerate XCOM gameplay. Wait for a discount.
 
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lightbane

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Joined
Dec 27, 2008
Messages
10,158
Sounds like "try if you liked the demo, but wait for the ultimate edition" deal, as usual nowadays. Still:

Are there signs of multiple endings depending on your choices? Does using mutations for your troops affect sanity or something? Are there black women (with or without afro), or blatant political messages?
 

lightbane

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Dec 27, 2008
Messages
10,158
Welp, what a massive, MASSIVE waste of an opportunity. Maybe patches and future DLCs change this, because otherwise it is inane that having one of your seamen grow pincer arms is not given a second thought.

Extra points if you eventually fight mutated humans at some point but no mention of your mutants is made as well.
 

lightbane

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Dec 27, 2008
Messages
10,158
I would say Shadow of the Comet is an exception, but a rare one. Now that Lovecraft is trendy, half-baked games using his style were to be expected, but I hoped this one would be above average at least.
 

chuft

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2008
Messages
496
What role do line of sight and ranged weapons play? Underwater I would think not much. Is it a giant melee?
 

Lacrymas

Arcane
Joined
Sep 23, 2015
Messages
17,948
Pathfinder: Wrath
I would say Shadow of the Comet is an exception, but a rare one. Now that Lovecraft is trendy, half-baked games using his style were to be expected, but I hoped this one would be above average at least.
Hot take: Lovecraft is overrated as an author. I've always found his prose very stilted and it's even worse in the Cthulhu mythos. His best works are The Rats in the Walls, The Picture in the House, and The Music of Erich Zann. One of which has nothing to do with any eldritch abominations (incidentally the most brilliant of them), and the others being only very tangentially related to such. I'd say this is the reason why adaptations rarely work out - apart from the obvious impossibility of visually depicting unimaginable creatures and even worse understanding of the point of such - the source material is suspect. I also wonder why adaptations always seem to focus on Shadow over Innsmouth above all the others, arguably one of the most unsubtle of his works. Maybe that's why.
 

sser

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1,866,662
I would say Shadow of the Comet is an exception, but a rare one. Now that Lovecraft is trendy, half-baked games using his style were to be expected, but I hoped this one would be above average at least.
Hot take: Lovecraft is overrated as an author. I've always found his prose very stilted and it's even worse in the Cthulhu mythos. His best works are The Rats in the Walls, The Picture in the House, and The Music of Erich Zann. One of which has nothing to do with any eldritch abominations (incidentally the most brilliant of them), and the others being only very tangentially related to such. I'd say this is the reason why adaptations rarely work out - apart from the obvious impossibility of visually depicting unimaginable creatures and even worse understanding of the point of such - the source material is suspect. I also wonder why adaptations always seem to focus on Shadow over Innsmouth above all the others, arguably one of the most unsubtle of his works. Maybe that's why.

Adaptations rarely work out because the talents doing them don't even understand the source material.


What role do line of sight and ranged weapons play? Underwater I would think not much. Is it a giant melee?

There's a variety of ranged weapons. Your basic spear gun, then little abilities like spear-guns becoming veritable machine guns, or spear guns tipped with poisons etc. etc.

Also things like ranged "spells" you use from shared mana and of course artillery in the form of bombs and the like.
 

lightbane

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Dec 27, 2008
Messages
10,158
What made Lovecraft scary and what does it really mean being lovecraftian ? Information around is cluttered with tropes.

Basically the fear of unknown, that the outside space might be filled with entities beyond our human comprehension, that could crush us like a bug, perhaps without even realizing it so.
His descriptions were quite good and evocative.

I liked his Randolph Carter stories, which are closer to pulp-fantasy than horror, but they're barely used by the media (there's that recent game allegedly based on it, with the protagonist sharing the same name, but it is a walking simulator so fuck that).
 

Lacrymas

Arcane
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Messages
17,948
Pathfinder: Wrath
I got
THAT CREAMY, VIVID IMMENSITY...
......... yeah


Basically the fear of unknown, that the outside space might be filled with entities beyond our human comprehension, that could crush us like a bug, perhaps without even realizing it so.
His descriptions were quite good and evocative.
I don't think the creatures themselves are the most important thing. It is the feeling of hopelessness and isolation that grips you after encountering something unbelievable or traumatic. There is no salvation, only the passage of time until everything is consumed or assimilated. Stephen King has a pseudo-Lovecraftian novel, The Mist, which kinda touches on some elements but never gets the point. The people are isolated in the supermarket, but they are together, and they believe each other because they are experiencing the same thing. That's not Lovecraftian imo. The point in this novel is how extreme circumstances lead to extreme actions and the creation of factions that mistrust each other. The creatures in Lovecraft are, at their core, intimate and personal, like trauma, something that horrifies you to the point of being unable to live your life but is completely immaterial to other people. It's a good point, but the prose is stilted and it gets muddled around the inclusion of the 37th creamy, vivid immensity.
 

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