The Occult Chronicles is a Lovecraftian horror roguelike by Cryptic Comet, makers of other strange and confusing games like Solium Infernum and Armageddon Empires. So you know it's gonna be really cool but also really confusing with lots of strange rules.
Boy does it deliver on that front. The game is a sort of hybrid board/card game with heavy roguelike elements. When you first play it will make no sense at all. I'll try to illuminate a bit. You play an investigator who's sent into a mansion to complete some kind of task, of which there are several. To win you have to explore the mansion, find clues, equipment, skills, etc. to increase your strength, and eventually delve into the depths of the mansion to confront the Supreme Horror. If you're prepared, you'll defeat it and leave a hero. But you're probably not prepared.
You make your character by choosing from a few stats corresponding to Tarot suits. You've got swords for combat, cups for physical tasks, wands for mental tasks, and pentacles for magic. You also have health and sanity. these can go up and down mostly infinitely, you're not setting max values or anything. If either goes to zero you lose. It's generally best to specialize. You can usually pick the types of challenges you undertake, so it's better to be great at one thing than mediocre at everything. You also choose a background with various bonuses, a "bone" or die, which determines what kinds of special abilities you can use, and an "edge" which does various things.
As a quick suggestion before I try to illuminate the very confusing challenge system, I suggest starting off with a Wands character. 4 wands 1 pentacles, everything else in health, mentalist background, and a psychic talent of some sort. Horror challenges are frequent and unavoidable. A strong-minded character can resist them easily and they make a great source of easy advancement points. Low-wands characters tend to lose a lot of sanity and miss out on those advancement points. The health is because you'll have trouble in combat encounters.
The challenge system is a game in and of itself. You deal out two sets of tarot cards, face-down tricks and face-up draws. You reveal tricks one by one and attempt to place a same-suit card of higher value on top of it. Aces low, King>Queen>Knight>Page. This gives you points toward solving the challenge. Bigger tricks are worth more points. If you can get the required number of points you win, accomplishing whatever you tried to do and getting a reward. A set of reward cards are dealt and you flip a number of them based on the challenge. Most of them will be nothing, but you can also get health, sanity, advancement tokens, and rarely equipment and other nice things.
If you fail, you get a similar set of penalty cards and you have to reveal them. If you have a talisman there's a chance of it appearing on a card. If you reveal that card and there's something bad on it, that penalty is negated and there's a chance of the talisman disappearing. The penalties are like the rewards, loss of health and sanity, long-term penalties, with a small chance of instant death or insanity.
As for how this shit is all determined, each challenge has a flat difficulty number that represents how many points you have to score to win. You subtract the first symbol value from that number to get your final target. The second symbol determines the number of face-down tricks and the third symbol determines your draws. You want as many as possible for both of them. If you've got ten draws and only one trick you've got a good chance of winning that trick but if it's not enough points to win the challenge it won't matter.
This is why you want to specialize. Most challenges have several options and it's best to make sure one of those options is as easy as possible. The big weakness of that mentalist I mentioned before is that while he does great on anything mental, if he gets into combat he can't fight /and/ he can't run away. So he'll take a ton of damage while he tries to get out.
There's a lot more to it than that, but I don't want to spoil too much about it. It's a lot of fun just playing around and seeing how the rules interact. It can be very frustrating too though. The card element means it's very random, and sometimes you just can't seem to win a challenge you have no business losing. As the link above describes, sometimes you'll go insane trying to unlock a door.
But losing is fun, right?
Anybody else play this? What's your favorite strategy? The game isn't free, but there's a demo that lets you play through 75 turns. Give it a spin, it's cool.
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Topic: The Occult Chronicles - Roguelike Boardlike Cardlike Gamelike Cthulhulike (Read 1881 times)