The Last Spell: heavy synthwave dark fantasy tactics roguelike citybuilder goodness

[upupdowndown]

has anyone else been playing The Last Spell?

It's a dark fantasy roguelike that plays like an isometric TRPG with a citybuilding aspect to it. Glorious dark synthwave score. It's tough - smart use of the game's metaprogression is essential, and you're definitely gonna die a bunch. I've been playing on Switch and while it looks and sounds great, the UI really needed some refinement for a gamepad.

Gameplay is split between:

daytime, when you repair your city's defenses, level your characters and pick their equipment, and build new defenses.

evening, where you position your doughty lil' heroes in anticipation of the coming nighttime hordes. you'll be told what direction(s) the

night, where your 3 characters fight off literally dozens of zombified people and creatures. A good move state is essential because you do NOT want to let a hero get hit more than a few times.

here's the Switch trailer:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1635317220078391296

 

[Falselogic]

I have not but it sounds real interesting!

 

[Octopus Prime]

It’s been in my Wishlist since it came out; it looks like precisely my jam

 

[YangusKhan]

I played it literally once on my Steam Deck when it was still in Early Access. At that time it did not have controller support, so I didn't really play it again, but now that it's actually out and has controller support, I want to get back to it. I am a fan of its Aesthetic.

 

[Olli]

You can't fool me, that's a Tower Defense game

 

[upupdowndown]

You can't fool me, that's a Tower Defense game

eh, while you do eventually unlock the ability to build ballistas etc., they're more for mopping up mobs that are almost dead - the vast majority of enemies need to be killed by your heroes. so there's a sprinkling of Tower Defense, but the nighttime combat is really primarily TRPG style.

also Tower Defense games tend to be real time, and TLS is very much turn-based.

 

[Paul le Fou]

Dark synthwave score, you say??

 

[Kalir]

This game are sick.

My favorite weapons of each class are sword, crossbow, and magic orb, but there's hot contention and I'll never dismiss any specific tool out of hand.

I don't know if the console versions got the patches to take them all the way up to PC patches yet, since I've been moving, but licensing console patches is always a thick forest with no landmarks.

 

[JBear]

It’s been in my Wishlist since it came out; it looks like precisely my jam

This, basically. It's been living at the top of my Steam wishlist since a friend streamed the Early Access version for me like a year ago, but I haven't pulled the trigger yet. I'm confident I'll become obsessed with it once I do.

 

[YangusKhan]

I've finally sunk some time into this game properly. I'm on night 5 of the first area. I'm getting into the swing of things now, so turns no longer take me like 20-30 minutes to decide on actions lol, but it does feel like it could ramp things up a bit quicker for my taste; I've S-ranked all the waves so far. I am sure it's going to get more difficult eventually, especially since it does seem to introduce a new enemy type during every new wave. I've only just started unlocking other weapon types too and they all seem super cool. I am not a huge fan of the controller layout/interface (whose crazy idea was it for the joystick to move around in menus??) but it's easier than having to download and learn a community layout on Steam Deck so whatever.

I do think the game could do a better job of teaching you about building defensive structures, as in, right now it doesn't seem like there's any reason to build anything because I can't really make any informed decisions about where to build walls or why I would even need to in the first place. I'm sure it will introduce more complicated structures, but again, nothing has been difficult enough to really warrant worrying about this part of the gameplay at all. Definitely makes the decision of how to salvage ruins/corpses really easy at least since I don't really care about getting more materials over gold.