No Small Roles celebrates the RPG experiences being created by small teams in the indie space.
XCOM is always at the forefront of my thinking when it comes to turn-based tactics. Mainly because at this point, I’ve been playing some variation of it for the past three decades, but also because of the things it brings to turn-based play.
Number one with a bullet is that it often puts you on the back foot. The more recent games from Firaxis have especially put humanity in a perilous position as the alien invasion overwhelms what little resistance there is, and for XCOM 2, humanity has already lost, and a lot of your fighting back comes from the hit-and-run school of warfare. You are vulnerable, outnumbered, and have to make the right choices if there is to be any hope of turning the tide.
I love that dynamic, and when I spotted Baptiste Villain’s Blood After Dusk on itch.io, I quickly noticed it had that kind of hook.
Currently, Blood After Dusk isn’t much of a game, as it’s in an early prototype phase, and it certainly shows at times (aside from technical hiccups, it’s currently very bright for a game set at night), but the core concept is quite evident in what is there. The player is a vampire who has clearly ticked off the local populace because they’ve burned down his castle and left them without a fixed abode. Bad enough, sure, but the thing about being a vampire is you have a particular reaction to daylight that no amount of suncream is going to fix.
So the mission is to head south in the hope of finding a new coffin to regenerate in, with the impetus on getting there before the sunlight arrives and turns you into dust. The locals are naturally not too keen on having you loose, so there’s always a group out to hunt you down, whether they be archers, priests, or other grumpy armed humans. But you do have tools to deal with that.
As you move south, you consume locals (with a neatly designed animation that sees pixels of blood drawn from the body of the victim) and use their blood to unlock a variety of extra abilities that might get you closer to salvation. These are designed with turn-based tactics in mind, altering the seemingly insurmountable odds in your favor ever so slightly.
You can choose abilities such as beast form (bat and wolf naturally), a dash that pushes you further ahead than normal, and even that most underrated of vampire abilities…time travel (no, I’m not being serious, but yes, time travel is a thing in this game).
Blood After Dusk: Bite-Sized Tactics
Being a wolf, for example, allows you to lunge further toward villagers, and even grab them from behind certain cover. The bat will enable you to fly over ground attacks, and expel a foul poison mist as you flutter along.
The dynamic is interesting because while you are increasingly vulnerable because of the encroaching dawn, being a vampire means you get to dole out bloody wrath along the way. The balance, while not fully there yet, contains some countermeasures, such as multi-turn cooldowns for special abilities or the fact that getting too close to churches nullifies your powers. Even in this embryonic form, Baptiste Villain has done a great job of creating a balanced vampire experience, given the circumstances.
Reacting to things with your vampiric foresight (basically seeing the area of effect of an impending enemy attack) allows you to turn your enemies’ attacks on themselves. Fire archers can be tricked into setting fire to villagers’ homes, which drives the occupants out into the open, primed to become a meaty snack and upgrade point for you.
The downside to this sneaky strategy is that you can quickly find yourself flanked as more and more units arrive on the map and your pathway to the relative safety of a cozy coffin opens up. Do you gamble survival for the night for a feast on the locals to boost your power for the next night? The opening night should tell you it’s not as simple as just booking it for the nearest wooden box and calling it a night.
Blood After Dusk is not yet the most refined turn-based RPG, but it’s not supposed to be yet. What is crucial at this early prototype stage is that it showcases its hook. If Baptiste Villain can build on the strong hook for this game, it could grow into something quite marvelous.
Blood After Dusk prototype is available now on itch.io
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