The Game-Wisdom 2013 Awards : # 8

Our next game is an indie game that tried to mix rogue-like design with lovecraftian horror for a unique design.

#8 — Occult Chronicles:

Developed by Cryptic Comet, Occult Chronicles was a challenging rogue-like built around defining a character and exploring a randomly generated mansion. Encounters were handled in a mini-game similar to solitaire where players had to use any abilities and luck to match enough cards to beat the encounter.

What’s interesting about Occult Chronicles is how everything tied together into one experience. The choices you made when defining your character determined the difficulty of specific encounters. While surviving encounters would net you a variety of rewards that could be used to further enhance your character.

The lore of Occult Chronicles was great and reminded me of their previous game Solium Infernum. Every encounter had a little back story to it and helped make the world seem that much bigger.

The problem with Occult Chronicle comes down to design and how the difficulty of the game can be everything from a cakewalk to absolutely brutal depending on the luck of the draw, literally. As after every encounter, you drew rewards from face down cards.

Defining your character at the start had major ramifications that many new players would have no idea about. And the right combo could either make things a lot easier to the point of game breaking, or impossible to survive.

But what Occult Chronicles lacks in terms of accessibility, it makes up for with a challenging take on the rogue-like genre, so much so that I recently wrote a 3 part series detailing the mechanics of the game. It’s also why this part is so short as I am out of things to talk about after detailing everything previously.

Cryptic Comet continues its run of interesting titles and while they may be a tough nut to crack, there is a lot to enjoy once you get over the initial hump.

Up next: # 7

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