And there’s a demo
I wouldn’t say there’s anabundanceof games in which you place actions on timelines, mind you. But those that do exist are neat, as Marge Simpson would say. TakeTarnished Blood.
In Tarnished Blood - why yes, itisa dark fantasyRPG- you lead a group of intrepid human warriors who are trying to keep their settlement alive in a world filled with hideous, hand-drawn beasties twenty times their size. A snippet fromthe Steam blurb: “No atrocity is considered taboo in the world where gargantuan bloodthirsty Maultigores roam the valleys, and the deceitful Celestials control the time-space continuum.” Righty-ho then.
There’s aDarkest Dungeon-style roguelike campaign loop - kill one of the aforesaid vicious leviathans, who range from relatively unthreatening rat ogres to nasty cannibal plants and many-armed cosmic gods, and you can use its hacked-off pieces to improve town facilities and shore up your fragile enclave of humanity. The game also features a traits-and-traumas system reminiscent of Darkest Dungeon’s positive and negative quirks.
The actual monster-hunting is worlds away from Red Hook’s game, however. In combat, you’re given a timeline you can wind from left to right to see the whole scene play out. By dropping move and ability actions onto that bar, you can deftly avoid your massive adversary’s swipes and land precision attacks and combos of your own, wearing the creature down body-part by body-part. You can reverse a few of these actions if they get you into hot water, but you don’t have total freedom to choreograph the battle. Locking in choices causes vines to grow along the timeline, gradually swallowing up icons and preventing them from being removed.
There’s a selection of classes with signature skills - a bow-wielding class might be able to see silhouettes marking vantage points from which arrow shots deal extra damage - and each character has a loadout with slots for shields and armour pieces. A run is said to last around 10 hours, with different pop-up story events each time. Going by the Steam screens, these story events include unplanned orgies brought on by exposure to psychadelic plants.
