isleofdia [any]

me spending four hours writing this entire list down in LibreOffice and copy-pasting it into here like:

yeah, my gaming tastes over the years has pretty much been narrowed down to single-player party-based games of whatever type, and turn-based RPGs tend to be the most common manifestation of that, so i’ve really scoured the depths of the gaming mines looking for interesting gems. When this post came up, the spirit of posting welled up inside me compelling me to , so here i am. will prob go back to lurking for the most part tho lol.

(also how do i do spoilers within spoilers, to make the post more navigable?)

Wildermyth was pretty good in terms of artstyle and combat, for sure. Kinda neutral on character interaction scenes, because the combo of personalities my party consisted of seemed to result in dialogue between characters that seemed… disjointed? Seemed like different personalities were talking past one another, and it kinda seemed to be reflected in the larger plot scenes as well. I did really appreciate the game providing positive incentives for nurturing adversarial relationships between party members, no other game with party member relationship mechanics i’ve played so far seems to take relationship mechanics to that extent.

Full agree on Fell Seal, the only good things about it were playing around with the classes, character customization, and monster taming. Still worth a few hours if ur able to tune out all the plot

MARDEK is an absolute Flash classic for certain, but also one that seemed kinda obscure/hard to find on Flash game sites if I remember correctly? Pretty dope.

I also think Epic Battle Fantasy 3 and Epic Battle Fantasy 4 hold up fairly well in the present as well, with EBF 3 being free and EBF 4 also on sale rn. People can also try out EBF 1 and 2 in the Epic Battle Fantasy Collection, but those are rougher in comparison .

This is the post that finally got me to quit lurking and make an account, cuz boy, do I have some good turn-based slop to offer everyone that I have not seen listed here yet and the sale is still going on:

Sale

-“Our Adventurer Guild” ($11.99, -20%): The most well-executed fantasy XCOM-like that I’ve played thus far, both in the combat layer and the hub layer. Plot and side characters are corny, character artwork wouldn’t look out of place in Flash-era AdventureQuest, but if you don’t mind that, party compositions have a lot of viable variety, character classes have a variety of mechanics and depth, and one can make some pretty wacky builds. Lots of aspects of difficulty can be customized according to a slider, and if that’s not enough, you can configure a custom .ini to adjust some of the other hub layer mechanics. Developer is very active in responding to suggestions and feedback, which is why the difficulty sliders were implemented. Has a demo people can download and try out.

-“Stolen Realm” ($9.99, -50%): A low-poly version of the Divinity: Original Sin series, with its emphasis on interactivity between elements. Single-player but can be played online or couch co-op, comes with a structered “Story” mode or a quick “Roguelike” mode that’s all advancing from one combat round to the next. Players and enemies ragdoll into the ether when defeated, and with no restrictions on equipment or skill choice, players can come up with ridiculous gimmick builds. For the most part performs great, but when you get into the late to end-game and are stacking and unleashing multiple effects on the field, performance can become a little intense.

-“Horizon’s Gate” ($9.99, -50%): Pixel-art RPG with an emphasis on naval exploration, though majority of combat is done in dungeons on land. Gameplay loop heavily incentivizes exploration of the world and looking through item descriptions, with the caveat that you’re essentially compelled to engage in naval trading to gain income to manage your food supplies, but a dedicated mod community on Steam Workshop alleviates that and provides plenty of dungeons. Has a lot of different, mechanically-varied fantasy races that do not seem to be derived from traditional RPG properties, with humans taking a backseat both mechanics-wise and lore-wise. Combat system is also focused on interactivity with elements in the vein of D:OS. You can also buy this game and other Rad Codex RPGs on itch.io, though they are not currently on sale. All the Rad Codex games are good quality, but each entry has different narrative framing and gameplay emphasis, but the same combat core. Big fan of this one and “Alvora Tactics”, which is a straight party-based dungeon crawler where you explore the corpse of a Big Snake. The sequel, “Kingsvein” is also currently on sale for $14.99, -25%.

-“Wasteland 3” ($7.99, -80% for base game. $13.32, -79% for base + DLCs): Post-apocalytic RPG from a studio founded by one of the founders of Interplay, which created OG Baldurs Gate and Fallout. CEO appears as a mob boss, and you can shoot him. Help out a robot commune, fuck up a Reaganite cult, support a workers’ uprising in a steel mill. Much to see in the frozen hell of Colorado and many kinds of guns to shoot with.

-“Jagged Alliance 3” ($22.49, -50%): In which you send mercenaries out to a Francophone Global South nation to questionably make the chaotic situation there better and more likely make it worse. You do have the option to help out a communist national liberation movement in the north which is dope.

The ability to customize contemporary firearms is standout, and mods on the Steam Workshop that add more guns further increase this capability. Different types of guns have different abilities they work best with, making a pistol build quite useful compared to IRL.

-“Monsters’ Den: Godfall” ($4.49, -70%): The most recent iteration of a party-based dungeon crawler that started out as a Flash game. Good for spending a few hours at a time, not the biggest fan of Diablo-like loot systems in general. Whole collection is available on Steam and can be gotten for like, less than $10 if feeling nostalgic.

-“Sonny Legacy Collection” ($8.99, -10%): Not part of the Steam Turn-Based Festival sale, but special mention due to one of the Flash-era turn-based RPG greats being available on Steam. Does not, contrary to the description, seem to be a modernization of the game, just a straight port of Sonny 1 and 2 from the Flash-era version, with all the same bugs and exploits.

-“Crown Wars: The Black Prince” ($27.99, -30%): Overall mid, medieval XCOM-like set during the Hundred Years’ War. Am a fan of the concept, particularly the flashy finishers and playing around with low-fantasy classes, and combat is fun. Game seems to be poorly optimized, with a number of anecdotal player reviews alleging high GPU temp spikes, English voice acting does not appear to have much if any direction, and developers do not seem to respond to or check feedback, whether through forms, Discord, or Steam. Sail the high seas for it if you want to try it out, wasn’t able to find a fully updated version at the time I played, but it should prob be easier to do so now that it looks like the developers are done with updates to the game. -“Himeko Sutori” ($4.74, -75%): An army-based game in the style of Ogre Battle, for all you Ogre Battle-heads out there. Haven’t played this yet, since I’m more interested in the sequel project, “Septaroad Voyager”, which is a party-based RPG based on the Gambit system in Final Fantasy XII (also resurfaced somewhat in Pillars of Eternity II), so don’t really have too much to say. The developer’s defining characteristic as comes across in interviews is that he worked at the CIA before being disillusioned, leaving the agency, and turning to game dev instead, which like, lmao.

-“Caravaneer 2” ($4.79, -20%): Flash-era post-apocalytic game with a heavy emphasis on trading and resource management, lots of inspiration from OG Fallout, kinda a grade above the other Flash games of the time. Developer seems to be a Ukrainian anarchist or anarchist-sympathetic, given that Noam Chomsky and Nestor Makhno are hireable characters (he also recently released a free game that is explicitly pro-Ukraine, so oof, lol).

-“Knights of the Chalice 2” ($38.24, -15%): Kinda torn on whether to recommend this. For one, the developer is a certified libertarian crank, as his website has a section called “Libertarianism” which leads to his book he wrote on taxation, and the table of contents for his book is full anti-communist sections. Also reflected in the absurdly high pricing for a game that was Kickstarter-funded, and the paltry discounts he offers (this is probably the lowest price I’ve seen it). Some questionable choices in the game as well! Tutorial has one female party member that joins up whose dialogue is just… infantile and kinda gross. Tutorial and main campaign is stacked with unfair fight after unfair fight, ambushes at every corner, reinforcements appearing out of nowhere. Kudos to the dev in this one instance, enemies will pull out every mechanic at their disposal to kill you. Even when adjusting all the difficulty options to easiest, this game is very much an endurance test. Lots of homebrew DND classes added in, but difficulty of game can vary dramatically depending on which classes are picked. Sail the seas for this one.

Not on sale

-“Creator of Another World/異世界の創造者” ($18.99): Roguelike party-based RPG in which the isekai concept makes the leap from print media back to video game form, truly innovative. Labels itself casual in difficulty, so its a comfortable power fantasy to settle into, but also has classic JRPG gameplay elements like post-game dungeons and plot and extremely long dungeons. Has a demo to try out.

-“Together in Battle” ($19.99): Has its origin in the Flash-era “Telepath RPG” series, and worldbuilding continues to make use of that setting. An arena battler still in early access where you manage a team of gladiators, but seems to have a level of competent writing so far in comparison to other indie games on this list in terms of plot writing and character interaction. I think it has the potential to be another successful XCOM-like when it hits full release in terms of hub-level management, but even in early access I very much enjoy the gameplay loop.

Special shoutouts to “Divinity: Original Sin 2”, the predecessor to Baldur’s Gate 3 that had a combat and skill system that inspired quite a few of the other games listed above, and “Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire”, which barely counts by dint of including a turn-based mode, we love a game where you can choose to rep an anti-colonial struggle and oust two different factions of colonizers. Also I vastly preferred Pillars of Eternity to its contemporaries in Pathfinder, it just does not require an encyclopedic-level knowledge of the Pathfinder class system to get started, and I prefer RPG systems that stray further away from tabletop mechanics.