Never’s End is the new strategy RPG from a former Destiny developer in which you lead a party of possessed villagers against a ravening (yet cuddly) tide of undead. At a glance, it’s an elegantly muted Final Fantasy Tactics, with doll-sized characters on a spinnable grid-based map. In the hands, it’s surprisingly reminiscent of Larian’s Divinity: Original Sin games, with a nerdy application of thermodynamics that lets you transform each map into a vortex of mist, flame and increasingly naked skeletons.
The game’s equivalent for ice and fire magic is heat transfer, which mimics/travesties the scientific definition of heat, rather than being about summoning Ifrit or whatever. You click two tiles within a casting area to move energy between them, making one tile colder, the other hotter. Heat a tile repeatedly and it’ll tire out, then ignite any flammable creature standing on it; cool it down and you’ll get mist, then snow, depending on the humidity. Heat transfer also creates wind, and wind can move characters and objects around. Equipment can get wet or catch fire. Do you see? Do you see? No? An example then.
I’m currently fighting a skeleton king and his retinue inside a crypt. It’s not going so brilliantly, mostly because I forgot to give two of my four characters weapons, and when you punch armored skellingtons with your bare hands in Never’s End, you lose a point of health. Argh, I hate when games treat me to the consequences of my inactions! Still, I’m compensating for my blunder using heat transfer. I’ve dropped the temperature in the middle of the chamber, shifting energy from three different tiles to one tile by a pillar.
This is paying off in two ways. Firstly, I’ve conjured an icy haze, lowering the accuracy of the other side’s ranged units (a crossbow skellybro and two gobby giant spiders). Secondly, I’ve created a windstorm, sucking the advancing revenants into the super-heated tile and slamming them together for a bit of damage, while sabotaging their flanking manoeuvres and incinerating their equipment, to boot. Alas, the skellies themselves are fireproof, but they aren’t nearly as threatening when you reduce their wooden gear to ash.
It’s a fair result, but as in Larian’s games, the drawback of starting a fire is that fires like to spread. My party’s tank is now burning brightly, and heat transfer doesn’t seem to work very well as an extinguisher. Sorry about that, Karl!
This is theoretically just the tip of an iceberg of terrain alchemy that may extend to the cultivation of actual icebergs. Later, you’ll learn how to scoop up and reroute waterways, elevate rock pillars, and melt the very stone into lava. It feels like a proper witch’s cauldron. I suspect it might deter players who just want to flank and backstab and control the high ground, as in vanilla FFT, but I’m enjoying the moderate chaos.
Here are some other things in Never’s End that might remind you of Larian’s games, and D&D generally: you can shove characters, pushing them into hazards or over ledges, and you can throw objects, including your equipment, which is dangerously addictive. Dead characters leave skulls behind, and these make useful projectiles in a pinch. Cheers, Karl!
As regards the more generic moving parts, your actions inside a turn are constrained by time and stamina bars. Each character moves one by one according to the top initiative bar, rather than player and enemy teams acting as a group. Weapons have familiar characteristics – serrated blades inflict bleeding damage, maces are good for stunning blows, spears can reach a couple of tiles away. And yes, flanking, backstabbing and seizing the high ground are still viable gambits here.
The world’s battle maps are clipped together in a fashion that reminds me of Supergiant’s ageing Bastion – approach the edge of one, and you’ll see a greybox preview of the next, including enemies and rewards. It might seem dinky, but there’s apparently “an open world of rain-soaked jungles, blistering deserts, and freezing tundra” to discover.
And then there’s the storyline and town management stuff, which the demo doesn’t dip into. In the full game, you’ll be able to place buildings like inns and restore corrupted settlements, but the grim twist is that all of the villagers you’re safeguarding are potential vessels. You yourself are a deathless warrior spirit of molten silver. You can touch NPCs to replace their souls with amalgam, transforming them into fighters. The other Ominous Boding is that the more villagers you ‘recruit’, the stronger the world’s undead blight becomes. Could you be the real bad guy? Go ask Karl. I think he rolled behind a sarcophagus somewhere.
Read more about it and try the demo for yourself on Steam. It’s early days, but I think this could be a Good One.
