Let’s be honest we’re always hunting for the next isometric RPG so Last Solace feels like the perfect game to announce this morning. I’d already mentioned it in a piece a while back about the new indie games and I thought it was worth giving a bit more detail on it.
Developed and published by Pale Colors, Last Solace is a single-player CRPG with turn-based combat and an overhead camera. You’re a mercenary and your party, chasing that one final contract through a dying empire. There’s a much bigger war going on in the background of course.
It’s low fantasy (magic is absolutely commonplace) and the intended tone is very much grounded but still epic. You’re going through the wilderness, the ruins, the battlefields, the cities and the castles. The point is that you make choices, you discover things and you resolve things in different ways and that will lead to different outcomes.
Classless Builds and Armor That Needs Looking After
Character development is classless so you can mix and match abilities, weapons and items with very few restrictions (although the Steam description doesn’t go into any detail as to how you acquire abilities or how progression works). That gives you, potentially, a huge amount of scope to try out different combinations.
Equipment can be found or crafted, and armor requires upkeep in order to continue to protect the character wearing it. Agility is also offered as an alternative method of defense.
The description says nothing about the exact nature of the relationship between armor, health, and incoming damage, so the degree to which it is dependent on equipment is still an open question.
What I’m interested in is how those two ideas might interact. With very little constraint on the build, the choice of protection could become another lever in the process of defining a character’s role. I’d like to see how much freedom the final system gives you when you’re deciding between armor and agility.
Smoke, Ice, and a Changing Battlefield
Environmental manipulation already has a number of real-world examples. Smoke grenades to obscure vision, ice walls to split an enemy force, and wind to blow a poisonous cloud about. That gives a good idea of the kind of tactical options Pale Colors is proposing. You can have abilities and items that affect the environment as much as the combatants.
The glacier face is the one I find most interesting. It’s the example of having an opposing force which immediately raises the question of which enemy you’re going to have to deal with first. That’s a great example to use in a longer gameplay presentation where you could actually show the effect of positioning and the available routes.
Boss encounters are another stated priority. Pale Colors has a small number of very long, multi-stage fights which are intended to require a change of strategy as the fight progresses. The appeal to me would be down to how meaningfully those stages would change the options available to the party (the description doesn’t go into any detail on this).
Last Solace is coming soon to PC via Steam. Below I share the trailer.
