Gothic horror is great, but you know what would be even better? Shoot it in the face, as is the case in video games. This is the premise of Alder blood, although it is taking a somewhat lively direction.
The world of Alder blood is not ours. Existing at about a mid-19th century level of technological sophistication, it’s a dark and brooding place. Beasts roam the wilderness, preying on the weak. Only large and well-armed human forces can hope to defeat them. It is much easier for the Hunters, former half-breeds carrying a seed of darkness. You are the leader, a leader of one of these groups. Duke, the tallest of your kind, has just gone blind looking for the solution to the beasts. You see, God is not only dead, but it’s his rotting corpse that’s spreading this discomfort in the world. It is up to you to continue the fight and free mankind from the scourge of darkness forever.
That a lot of beasts up is a bad thing.
Alder blood is a fairly light tactical RPG mechanically. When you go into battle, you take up to three hunters. Each of them has an amount of stamina points, which are spent on actions and movements. Once you have expended an endurance point to move, you can move freely in that territory, granting you more freedom than XCOM would have.
How am I going to hunt?
Surprisingly, there is little hunting. Missions usually require you to complete certain objectives, and they rarely involve killing. In reality, Alder blood insists that it would be best not to kill more beasts than necessary to achieve the goal. This increases local darkness levels (which is bad) and may even increase your hunters’ corruption levels (bad, but in a strategic sense).
Most of the time you will throw stones to distract the monsters and run from bush to bush. While some attacks may emit a sound that alarms enemies, your movement is completely silent. However, your hunters do give off a scent, so you’ll want to stay downwind of any monsters. The smell only alarms the monster, but if it is close enough it could move to investigate and find your hunters.
The prey was always the hunter
Alder blood stack the battle against you. If a monster sees you while you are moving on your turn, it can activate immediately to rush in and get the first hit. And most attacks deal stamina damage as well as health damage. Since using all stamina causes you to skip the next round, that’s a bad thing.
Fortunately, this also applies to monsters. It works wonderfully when paired with backstabbing – just sneak behind the monster and attack it with a small weapon, and it will immediately collapse exhausted. Exhausting enemies and running away is how you can complete a mission without killing monsters.
Either way, you don’t get any additional benefits from killing monsters. In Alder blood, you know all the mission rewards – XP included – in advance, so you don’t need to farm monsters. Just avoid killing to avoid losing HP and racking up corruption, and you will end up with a richer man.
Speaking of corruption, just like Wardens in Dragon age, the Hunters pay dearly for their Métis nature. Each of them will accumulate more corruption as you play. If they hit a breaking point, they break, deal damage to other hunters, and die. You avoid this by doing two things: not suffer an excessive amount of corruption and sacrifice your old corrupted Hunters to transfer their XP to freshly hired replacements.
Alder blood is trees, man!
A mechanic that requires you to consume your troops would hurt in a game like XCOM, Phoenix Point, Where Jagged Alliance, but not in Alder blood. Not only are your Hunters randomly generated, they don’t have much to make them stand out. The stats that define them in the game matter less than their gear.
All the skills you gain as you level up are just passive upgrades that only matter while camping. So you don’t lose your favorite Ranger when you sacrifice someone, but you might run out of the capacity of their equipment. Likewise, a new batch of Mission Recruits will not perform significantly worse than Veteran Soldiers. In a sense, this makes it less likely that you will run into a death spiral than in XCOM.
With equipment, each hunter can have two weaponry each. Anything can go into the large weapon slot, while the small weapon slot only accepts some. During the game, you will wield axes, swords, daggers, guns, harpoon guns and more. Heavy weapons slow down a hunter. Guns make its smell stronger (due to gunpowder) and block an item slot (due to ammo addiction). Each hunter can also permanently equip (or replace) one or more charms – stat buffs. The transitive nature of charms means you can’t just perfectly duplicate an old hunter after transferring their XP to a new guy.
Construction of traps and harpoon guns
The items section – Hunter can equip one more – shows a lot of variety. You have traps, various throwing knives, medical supplies, and even hand grenades. One of the possible camping tasks in Alder blood, the others being custody, recovery and healing. Salvage is the way to get food, money, and crafting materials by spending a day in a location. Each location, a node on the strategy map, has its own rating for each salvage asset, so some locations are better than others. You cannot send all of your hunters to recover, as they risk injury and real ambushes. Some will have to remain on their guard. It is usually best to devote each night to a certain activity to maximize results.
And while more hunters consume more food, I’ve found that running with a larger group allows for more recovery and tinkering, in addition to providing a good pool of retreat troops.
THE YOUNG PEOPLE WILL EAT THE OLD
Alder blood really stands out for its stylized and brooding art. The game is all about 2D artwork and characters, map node backgrounds and even mission maps really stand out. The Hunters and the monsters themselves… no. The enemies look good but not great, and more variety and a more unifying theme would have been ideal.
At the same time, the audio works well, especially the music. There really isn’t any vocal dialogue in the game, although a character can say a thing or two to spice up their new textbox. And the last patch before release introduced unity grunts in Alder blood, so that your Hunters are no longer speechless.
I feel a little jaded about Alder blood. On the one hand, the game looks great and the writing, while awkward, can inspire a bit of awe. Gameplay is lacking, however, as you don’t get too attached to your hunters, don’t hunt a lot, and barely understand why your people are supposed to be so much better than regular humans. Sure, you can morph into a shadow form to instantly kill an exhausted monster, but you wouldn’t need it if you replaced three weirdos with swords with five regular dudes with shotguns.
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