Game: Alder’s Blood
Platform: PC, Switch
Genre: turn-based tactics, stealth
Style: heavy Lovecraftian influences
Verdict: Mixed
Lovecraft Video Games received a review copy of Alder’s Blood through the Steam Curator Program.
God is dead. Now his corpse spreads darkness across the land. Twisted monsters roam, held back only by the Hunters willing to risk everything to protect what remains of humanity.
I love the story premise of Alder’s Blood. It is fascinating, bleak, and Lovecraftian through and through. The sense of cosmic horror that fills this game can’t be overstated, especially because of how it factors into the gameplay. If you think hunting Lovecraft-inspired monstrosities born from a dead god’s corpse sounds like a tough challenge, you’d be right.
Alder’s Blood is a turn-based tactics game with a heavy emphasis on stealth. Fighting enemies out in the open is pretty much never what you want to do. You want to hide, ambush enemies when necessary, and generally avoid them as much as possible.
This means staying out of enemies’ lines of sight and using distractions so you can sneak around them. It means being cautious of noisy attacks (such as guns) so enemies can’t hear you, and steering clear of enemies that will alert the others. It means keeping an eye on the wind and how far your scent travels to make sure nearby enemies won’t smell you either.
Dying is all too easy once an enemy spots your Hunter, but that isn’t the only reason to avoid combat. Killing unnecessary enemies makes your Hunters’ corruption levels rise faster. After a certain point, you’ll have no choice but to either sacrifice your Hunter to strengthen another or just let them die from the corruption. Fortunately, you can hire new Hunters, although not without paying them a good chunk of your valuable silver.
Outside of combat, you’ll spend your time scavenging for food (which is consumed whenever you rest or travel), silver, and other important resources, and crafting equipment or items your Hunters can use in battle.
Then there are quests. You’ll travel across the game’s world map from one location to the next to help people in need, work with the various factions, and progress the story. While there are main quests to advance the story, each side quest is filled with dialogue as well, and everything works toward building this bleak, atmospheric world.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to beat Alder’s Blood. Turn-based strategy games are okay for me, although I’m not the greatest, and I’m terrible at stealth. And Alder’s Blood is hard.
That was disappointing, because I liked what I saw of the world and story, but ultimately I can’t give a solid recommendation on this game either way except to say that if you’re looking for a bleak, brutally unforgiving tactics game with a grim cosmic horror story, Alder’s Blood is definitely that.