The Game
Psychic exiles fight turn by turn across a Europe six million years gone, while two off-world peoples go to war over it. Between fights, there's a camp to keep alive.
Squad tactics, turn by turn
Missions are turn-based fights on ground shaped like real country. Your squad moves up, gets behind rock and timber, takes the high ground and sets overwatch, then shoots with whatever came through the Rift: bows, slings, spears, and one salvaged rifle with a few power cells left in it. Anything out of sight stays hidden. Someone has to scout it, or a Seer has to look.
One mission sends you to wipe out a patrol. The next wants a captive freed, a ridge held, or the squad out before the alarm brings the reserve. When an exile drops they're downed, and two turns later they bleed out unless somebody gets to them. Panic spreads. An exile who watches a friend fall can freeze where they stand, and since the campaign is ironman, the dead stay dead.
Psychic powers that change as they grow
A crown wakes one of four disciplines. Shapers throw stone and heave up walls, and Menders close wounds or pull the downed back to their feet. A Seer's sight goes through rock. Voices get into minds, with a whisper that spoils an enemy's aim, a dread that sends it scrambling back to cover, or a phantom exile it wastes its shot on.
Every power costs Will. It's the same resolve that keeps an exile steady when the fight turns bad, so a Shaper who spends freely on turn two may be the one who breaks on turn four. Brine Choir singers drain it from eight tiles off.
Climbing the five ranks from Glimmer to Zenith changes what a power does. At the turning points you pick a branch. Hurl can become a spray of scree that clips the enemies around its target, or a stone driven straight through half cover. Higher up it turns into a rockfall dropped on a tile you can see but can't reach, and at the top into a landslide that hits everyone inside it, your own people included. A Mender's touch can grow into a reach across the field, a ward laid on before the blow lands, or one cast that raises every downed exile within three tiles. Nearly forty forms in all. Switching an exile's branch at camp is allowed. It costs them a week on the bench.
Powers in action
Each of these is an evolved form, cast with the game's own rules and caught mid-cast.
The exiles
Everyone who came through the Rift had a life and a reason to leave it. A recruit turns up with a profession and an age, skills, a temperament and some psychic potential in each discipline, all of it written up in a dossier you can read and edit. Week by week at camp, friendships form. So do rivalries, and the odd romance, and a squad of friends goes into a fight with more Will than a squad of strangers.
Crowns are scarce, so most of your people never wear one. The Uncrowned go out with slings and bows next to the psychics. In the field every exile is a full 3D model, animated, holding whatever weapon you handed them.
The camp
Some regions have a site worth settling. You get one home camp, and as you take ground you can push out a couple of outposts. A site can run a mine, timber, salt pans, a hunt, herb gathering, shard diggings or a watch post. What comes in pays for research (nineteen studies across five strands), for training, and for a crown forge that makes new crowns and re-forges old ones up a tier.
Expect raids. Stakes, a ditch, a gate, towers and a crystal ward all stand on the battlefield itself, so when you defend the camp you fight from behind whatever you built.
A campaign across a lost Europe
The map runs from Britain and the Atlantic coast east to the Balkans and Anatolia. Fifty regions, cut from real elevation data, with the Mediterranean dried down to salt and brine in the middle. The Glass Court and the Brine Choir are at war with each other as well as with you, garrisoning regions, raiding your camp and striking wherever you've spread thin.
A capital falls in three missions back to back: the outer works first, then the walls, then the citadel. Every few weeks a hidden refuge sends new exiles your way. Story missions turn up as the war moves.
The enemy
The Glass Court got here first. Tall and elven, they wear stained glass for armour and hold the western uplands, and the crowns your exiles wear were forged by them. Wardens and their Captains form the line, with Lucents in heavy plate among them. Iridants fire a beam of light. Scintles range out ahead of everyone.
The Brine Choir settled the dying sea, and nothing about them is human. They fight with sound. A Chorister's Dirge drains Will from eight tiles away, and with the Choristers come small Descants, lean Antiphons and the Bourdon, a giant that neither stone nor mind can shift.
The world
Battlefields are generated from a dozen kinds of country: forest and parkland, marsh, canyon and badlands, steppe, alpine slopes, salt flats and brine shores. Cliffs and gullies follow natural landforms. Every plant on the map grew in Europe six million years ago, from pines and swamp cypress down to saltbush, and on the horizon the far ridges trace the real terrain of the region you're fighting in.
Each mission rolls its own weather and hour. Clear skies, overcast, rain, a dust storm, salt haze or snow, at dawn, by day, at dusk or at night. One wind runs through all of it, bending the grass and pushing the smoke. Boots kick up dust or splash through marsh, and powers leave scorch marks and cracked ground behind them. None of it touches the rules: hit chances, sight and movement stay exactly what they'd be on a clear afternoon.
The battle map editor
Besides the generated battlefields there's an editor that runs inside the 3D battle view. You paint terrain and height, place cover and camp pieces from the object library, and set enemies down one at a time with orders to guard, patrol or hold. Mark where the squad starts and where the captives and exits are, then hit play and test it on the spot. That's how the story missions get built.
Every image on this page is a work-in-progress capture from the game. See what's built and what's next on the progress page.