Remap streaming:
Spoilers, obviously.
Forgive me but I’m still trying to talk myself into this one despite my massive backlog and limited gaming time. It sound like the difficulty and learning curves are fine for casual gaming. Is this game suitable for playing in short bursts (i.e. missions don’t take too long and not too much busywork in between)? Can you pause any time?
I mean, it’s turn based, so it’s always paused. Individual rooms are very short (depending on how much analysis paralysis you may have, up to 5/10 minutes or so, but typically there are three or four chained together in a mission. Pretty sure you can save and quit at any point, but don’t take my word for it.
Yes, you can pretty much stop after a mission and come back later if you like. You might be pushed back one inter-mission screen or something but in general it’s very “play in bursts” friendly. That’s how I do it, really.
I think it’s one of the best, most focused, and well-designed games of its type out there. The art direction, too, is very good, making the most of what they had to work with under their (perhaps self-imposed) limitations. What you see feels like it was very intentional, and I find it rather appealing. And the narrative, delivered in sharp, smart, short text boxes, is witty and well-crafted.
Best of all, the actual game systems are elegant and engaging.
As others have already mentioned, missions are typically fairly short, at least when you have an idea what you’re doing, but in experimenting in some of the more complicated rooms you can easily sink a half hour or more into them. But generally things move quickly. And it’s turn-based so you’re always “paused”.
But if you’re unsure, maybe just try the demo?
I just finished the campaign in a couple of days. 11 hours on hard, no optional content (which I would assume is another 5 hours at least).
Writing and tactical gameplay was really good.
The campaign is well paced and presented enjoyably. The only content I didn’t like were the dream missions.
I was partial to the campaign-goal marker interludes even though they served no gameplay purpose.
As for the odd puzzle discussion: this is as much a puzzle as Into the Breach. You are working with a huge but limited number of options dealing with various challenges. There are at least dozens of solutions with each perk combination.
You are not looking for one or two pre-designed move orders in normal gameplay. Which is what I expect the “Ahh, puzzle game!” people are so scared of?
A couple of the optional challenge goals probably require pretty specific moves, but even there I found several solutions when I looked for them.
Each mission is 5-10m, and you can basically quit desktop at any time, even during a conversation, and the game just picks back up.
It’s a turn based game and so pausing isn’t really a thing, but yeah, you can hit ‘escape’ at any time and everything stops.
You’ve spent more time handwringing over this game than you would downloading and playing a mission in the demo. That would tell you everything you need to know about the game.
It’s currently my go-to game whilst holding a sleeping 2 month old baby, because it only requires a single free hand and I can stop it instantly!
I’m up to Act 4, and some of the confidence goals are impossible first time for me due to my perk selection. However I’m picking up the majority first time. They don’t even get you anything, other than achievements and points towards cosmetic costumes. It seems you basically have free refunds on all perks and can even replay old missions with any perks so it’s not an issue if you want to 100% things. There are certain “dream” missions (i.e. missions that don’t affect the story) which are much more puzzle-like as you get specific perk setups and so the goals here are always reachable, you just have to figure out how.
The odd thing is, even though the rewards for Confidence points are cosmetic, and given the art style of the game those cosmetics are pleasant but not terribly exciting, I still find myself really wanting to hit those optional objectives. Something satisfying about fulfilling some of those often utterly arbitrary requirements I guess.