Roguelikes have a special place in the pantheon of gaming. It’s generally a dark place teeming with despair, game over screens, and broken peripherals, but Overfall, the debut project of Turkish developer Pera Games, is a turn-based strategy RPG that successfully manages to incorporate several elements of the roguelike genre with minimal soul-crushing frustration.
The game opens with a beautifully animated and excellently voiced cinematic that explains the backdrop of the story. This introduction is our first glimpse at two strong aspects of Overfall: art and sound. The hand-drawn characters and locations are vibrant and diverse. The deformed character models with large heads can be a bit off-putting at first, but I quickly found them quite charming. The music is very good as well. It’s somber or high-tempo in all the right places and the acoustics are top-notch.
The immortal Everking, having united the tribes in their defeat of the Orcish emperor, foresaw a greater challenge on the horizon and sent two heroes through a mysterious portal to a distant world. Their task was to steal the powerful Disk of Ages to prevent disaster. The Vorn, hostile inhabitants of said alien world, took exception to this theft and chased the heroes back through the portal to the game’s world of Dys.
The returning heroes are greeted by a “Portal Keeper,” who informs them that three centuries have passed since they entered the portal. Worse yet, the Everking is missing and the races of Dys are at constant war with each other. A secret message left for the heroes reveals a way to locate the Everking, but it requires gaining the trust of the warring races.
Gaining that trust, or reputation, with the races of Dys is the main goal and crux of Overfall’s game progression. There are six races for which you can gain reputation: Dwarves, Elves, Orcs, Goblins, Hollows, and Forsaken. These races are paired off as enemies that are warring with one another, and gaining reputation with one means losing reputation with their rival.
The mechanism used to gain reputation is the “encounters” system. Overfall’s overworld is comprised of a water-filled world map sprinkled with various types of islands and ships sailing the seas. Navigating your ship into one of the other ships or islands triggers an encounter. Encounters are numerous and there are many types, though not so many that you don’t run into the same ones repeatedly after multiple playthroughs. They range from running into bandits that you have to fight off or simply helping a caveman build a fire. Successful completion of these encounters leads to rewards, including but not limited to increases in reputation; the rewards you receive depend on the decisions you make in dialogue choices during the course of the encounters.
This is where Overfall’s claim of interactive story and diplomacy comes into play. Choices do matter in the sense that they affect an individual encounter and playthrough. They could affect whether you engage or avoid a battle as well as whether or not you get a reward or reputation increases. Your choice to side with a particular race determines how the story progresses and how the rival race interacts with you as well. In the grand scheme of things, however, this is small scale stuff. None of your choices carry over into subsequent playthroughs or matter beyond unlocking things (more on that later). That’s sort of the point in a game like this, and I only mention it because we’ve been conditioned to have certain expectations from games claiming to be decision based.
Story is obviously not the selling point of this type of game, and there’s nothing groundbreaking about Overfall’s. However, it’s certainly above the level of afterthought. Since each race is at war with one of the others, there is history behind the animosity and each race has their own motivations. There are also tiny stories sprinkled throughout encounters that range from heartwarming to, quite frankly, really bizarre. The humor throughout the game is also generally solid, which is a nice touch and a welcome addition. Of note are some grammatical errors that seem sparse at first but become more noticeable through additional playthroughs. Most of them are not too big a deal, but some lead to confusing character exchanges and seem like the result of poor machine translation.
Since Overfall is based on a roguelike game model, playthroughs are relatively short by design. A complete game will take just a few hours at most, while an unfortunate encounter early on could end your journey in less than 20 minutes. The game can be quite unforgiving at times, and most of that has to do with two major factors: procedural world generation and combat.
Superficially, procedural generation of the game world only affects how the individual islands are situated throughout the world map and their related encounters. This may not seem important, but it comes into play when trying to build up reputation with a specific race since each is associated with an island type. Dwarves, for instance, are found on volcanic islands. If these islands are far apart, you spend an inordinate amount of time sailing between them.
And time is of the essence in Overfall, because there’s a built-in timer that increases the difficulty of the game as time progresses. The difficultly meter catalogs the progress of Vorn activities explicitly and is visible by the number of Vorn ships on the world map wreaking havoc. Less obvious is the fact that, as the meter reaches certain milestones, the number of enemies you have to face in each battle also increases. In addition to the time issues the randomness sometimes presents, you may run into encounters early in your journey for which you are simply not prepared. In these instances, the procedural generation throws the balance of difficulty and game progression off a bit.
Combat and character combinations are where the complexity and depth of Overfall truly shine through. You start each playthrough with just the two heroes in your party, and each has a set of skills associated with their class, equipped weapon, and equipped trinkets. Although your ability to configure your heroes is limited your first time through, it increases dramatically as you unlock additional classes, weapons, and trinkets. Throughout your adventures, and once you’ve met certain requirements, you’ll also unlock companion characters. You can then hire up to two companions at a time to join your party. The caveat here is that you need to build enough total reputation to be able to hire those companions every single playthrough. I found this annoying and an unnecessary frustration, since if you get caught up in one of those early off-balance battles with just two characters, you don’t have much of a chance.
Battles are turn-based, take place on a hex grid field, and each turn is broken into three phases: Movement, Utility (support skills), and Weapon (direct attacks). The complexity and depth come into focus when we consider the buffs and debuffs associated with all actions available during all three phases of battle. Condition management is a core focus of combat in Overfall and something you’ll need to grow accustomed to quickly. The buffs and debuffs applied to your characters are just as important as those applied to your enemy, and staying on top of them can and will mean the difference between victory and defeat.
The core construct of condition management puts extreme importance on the combinations of skills you select for your heroes as well as the available skills of your hired companions. Combining characters that both apply Bleed and have attacks that are enhanced by enemies with the Bleed debuff, for example, leads to amazingly potent combinations. The sheer number of skills provided by companions, classes, weapons, and trinkets means countless combinations and play styles with which to experiment. The depth and complexity of combat forces you plan, think strategically and, most importantly, have fun.
Overfall’s capacity to be brutal speaks to its roguelike influence, but it’s only on rare occurrences when it seems legitimately unfair. It provides a genuinely gratifying experience for those who like the challenge of roguelikes but is accessible enough for those not experienced with the hardcore elements typical of the genre. You’re almost guaranteed to throw your hands up in exasperation at some point, but you’ll quickly hit the restart button because you had a blast being absolutely demolished.
