Overfall has roguelike dynamics, well drawn graphics and balanced turn based combat system. It doesn't offer a big change but it does a lot of things right for the fans of role playing games.
Overfall is an RPG which uses tactical-turn-based combat, exploration and roguelike elements in it’s core. It has enormous potential in terms of story, innovative turn-based combat, replayability, unending possibilities and is a world full of different procedurally-generated floras of islands. Also, there is permanent death. Thus, once you fail you start again.
From my experience, as for closed-beta builds, there are no current game-breaking bugs and the devs are constantly updating the game.
You start the game by running away from some mysterious Viking-like horde called the Vorn which seeks to find an artifact you've been stolen from them. Literally, this is the main menu scenery. After you hit the start, you see the character creation. What I really like about character creation is that there are huge amount of combinations, but they must be unlocked by going through many playthroughs(as like many other roguelike games). In a regular playthrough, you’re almost guaranteed to unlock some stuff you can try at your next one.
Best part is, you choose two heroes instead of one to start the game. You get to choose their weapons(each weapon has 3 skills, but we’ll get to that later in combat), utility skills and trinkets(passive abilities). Apart from the starting gear, all of these include a lot of things to unlock within them.
Once you choose your combination and hop into the game, an old wizard-like man welcomes you at the entrance and says your arrival has been foretold in the prophecy, and that they’ve been waiting for you for ages. Gives you a little bit of introduction to the basic lore and sends you out to the ocean to reach your king. The main goal is; you must find your King who sent you through the Portal to steal the “artifact” and deliver it. But since it has been hundreds of years(probably because of some cosmic stuff done by the portal’s cosmic structure), nothing stayed the same as you left them. Your King is missing, there are conflicts all over the place and as if that’s not enough, you brought some nasty invaders with your arrival.
The game consists of “scenes” or whatever you call them all the way through. Every scene includes a beautifully painted and animated background image, your party members at the left side of the screen, thought bubbles as a reaction to the current situation, and responding situation at the other side the scene or NPCs to conversate. The bubbles are your clickable options and the way of choosing a response to what’s going on was implemented in such a cute way like I’ve never seen in a game before. There is also a narrative bar at the top of your screen that tells you about what’s happening in short sentences like a GM in D&D games. The scene with the old-guy who enlightens you about what’s the current situation is first of these scenes.
The “prophecy”’s advice to you is that you must activate 2 of the 6 beacons who are under control of the races of Dys.
What are beacons? Great question. The Beacons are magical wells who were given to the six main races, by raising your reputation and activating two of these magic beans, you break the invisibility spell of your king’s Citadel and reveal it on your map. This is the main progression of the game if your desire is to finish it.
Real conflict is, the Vorn somehow know about the beacons as well and are seeking to find them. Before you do… The progression of the reputations, beacon activities and the Vorn invasion are shown to you very clearly within the UI and it’s like a real time race-to-end combination of FTL and Risk of Rain, because the game gets harder as the invasion grows.
The Vorn constantly raze the islands they encounter to gather resources. They use these resources to establish a base, build officer ships, their King’s ship and by using all of that power, they start to invade homelands of main races to actually unlock the beacons you’re looking for.
After hopping to your ship, you start to visit the islands one-by-one. Encountering different adventures, gathering resources to upgrade your skills and weapons, adding new members to your party, raising/lowering reputations are few of the things you can expect in these islands.
At the moment, the game has limited amount of encounters but as I said, it’s an unending growth in terms of development.
As of encounters, the devs used a system where each character you include in your party might have a different opinion to what’s going on. Apart from that, there are multiple outcomes to each decision you make. This increases the chance to see different situations in an encounter every time you play.
Developer abused Steam systems and revoked legitimately purchased keys from over two years ago because of a dispute with their publisher. Don't give these people your money.
Overfall successfully mixes some unlikely genres to create a fulfilling experience, both through its brilliantly written dialogue and stimulating tactical combat.
Turn-based RPG that uses proven gameplay elements, and relies on humor and addictive gameplay. In the end you don't mind, that it's the same over and over again.
Overfall is a surprisingly deep game with some unique ideas. The game is very well paced and you get to explore plenty of interesting locations pretty quickly. The combat and dialogue systems are deep, complex and require some practice and experimentation. There’s plenty to see and do, but I would have liked to of seen a bit more narrative structure alongside the story building you get from conversations with others.
SummaryExplore the shifting seas of a strange realm. Fight challenging foes…or befriend them. Recruit lost souls and learn their histories. Take part in stories of the absurd and the tragic, the magical and the mundane - intimate, epic, and never the same twice in this fantastic strategy roleplaying game.