Here’s The Great New Tactics Game You Should Be Playing–And I Don’t Mean Fire Emblem Or Zero Company

I've been loving Star Wars Zero Company, especially for how it builds on my favorite story arc from The Clone Wars animated series. But whereas I was positive that Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave would be the title to finally pull me away from Zero Company, it's another tactics game that has captured my attention: Ex Sanguis.

It's no real surprise why I'm enjoying Lightbulb Crew's Ex Sanguis. While it's not a direct sequel to the studio's debut title, Othercide (one of my favorite games of 2020), Ex Sanguis has the same memorable visual style consisting of simple grayscale and striking crimson, a party of heroes who are all elegant women, and turn-based bloodbaths that satisfyingly reward triggering chain events. Ex Sanguis just feels like more Othercide, much in the same way Hollow Knight Silksong and Marvel's Spider-Man 2 feel like extensions to their respective predecessors.

Ex Sanguis has enraptured me so completely with how it differs from Othercide, however. Both tactics games have roguelike elements, but Ex Sanguis really leans into that genre's trappings to offer a snappier gameplay loop. You can boot up the game, play for 20-30 minutes, and feel good for accomplishing a few small victories that will benefit your future attempts. That's not really the case for Othercide, which is designed first and foremost as a brutally challenging tactics game.

Othercide sees you commanding an army of your daughters. Each day, you send a squad of three on a mission in hopes of unlocking a node at the end of the week, leveling up your units to unlock more permanent upgrades. If one dies, she and her perks are gone for good and the only way to replenish one daughter's health is to sacrifice another. Birthing new daughters costs valuable resources. This culminates in a loop of sacrificing units (some of which you've put a lot of time into) for the good of the mission. It's like playing a game like XCOM or Zero Company with permadeath on and purposively leaning into the tragedy of losing a beloved unit.

So while it's very much a tactics game, Othercide has a roguelike feel--from the jump, it's clear that you're not going to do well on your first time trying to unlock a node and face a boss, and you'll need to slowly accrue enough permanent upgrades to enough units to get strong enough to even have a chance at success. And if all your daughters die (which will surely happen more than once), then you're done for and have to start again.

Othercide is a long and arduous grind, one soothed by the intriguing lore that twists between each level and drip-feeds answers to the mystery of what your daughters are and why you're hellbent on sacrificing them to carve and shoot your way to whatever is at the end of all this violence. The game is perfect for folks who like to min-max, but even your best-laid plans can fail if the random nature of the changing levels between each failed attempt screws you over while you're trying to build up an ideal team for the boss at the end. And that can be really frustrating, so it's also a game for those with either a ton of time or a lot of patience.

Ex Sanguis, meanwhile, leans further into the roguelike formula by streamlining everything to make the overall gameplay easier. Each run is substantially shorter than those in Othercide, so getting to some sort of checkpoint is less intense, and it's easier to say, "Okay, one more run" after a failed attempt. The warriors under your command (they're called stillae, rather than daughters, in this game) heal between each mission, and new stillae spawn in automatically between missions if one falls in battle. And each stillae has a choice of one upgrade from three possible options after every mission instead of two, increasing your chances of replicating your favorite builds (and a limited-use re-roll feature to get rid of any options you absolutely hate raises those chances even more).

Ex Sanguis puts a greater onus on completing runs quickly to build up your party and then tackle a boss, while Othercide is all about perfecting how you play a tactics game (and scrapping a run partway through if the randomness of the roguelike elements screw you over on the permadeath mechanic) to have any chance of even holding your own against a boss. Ex Sanguis encourages you to earn a bunch of small victories on your way to each of the big victories, while Othercide is just all about those big victories and being okay with failing a whole bunch between each one. 

Structurally, Ex Sanguis still pretty closely copies Othercide, but I'm no longer drowning in despair at 3 AM because I bungled my latest run, lost my strongest daughters, and now I'm basically starting over from square one.

And like Othercide, Ex Sanguis is a fantastic tactics game. Time is the major factor in every battle. Each action that one of your stillae can take consumes a set number of points from the total pool they have--moving a great distance costs more points than only a few steps, for example, and weaker, fast attacks tend to be cheaper than stronger ones. If a stillae only uses half her total points on her turn, her turn ends as normal. However, you can command each of your warriors to go beyond her limits and use the second half of her points to perform extra actions. Doing so puts the stillae in a bad way, pushing her next turn further back on the overall timeline of the battle as she needs longer to recover. 

Success in a fight is often only rewarded by carefully considering how often to risk pushing any of your stillae in this way, as well as by stacking specific effects together. Certain environmental hazards can trigger explosive chain reactions, for instance, and some stillae can be equipped with abilities that don't act immediately on the overall timeline or only occur if a specific trigger happens, like an enemy wandering into melee range or a nearby stillae reducing a foe's health below a specific threshold. This encourages you to not only think through what you plan on doing next but how each of the various enemies are going to move and attack.

It's a complex series of considerations to keep in mind that only grows as new enemy types are introduced and you unlock more stillae abilities. But setting everything up in just the right way to pinball bounce an enemy into oblivion is so deeply satisfying, much in the same way I've adored Creature in the Well and Marvel's Midnight Suns.

That isn't to say Ex Sanguis is a universal improvement upon Othercide--for as much as this game improves Othercide's gameplay, it drops the ball on narrative. Othercide drips with a horrific gothic atmosphere. Its dark and foreboding story of a mother desperately attempting to utilize her womanhood to save a broken world suffering under a growing fracture in reality is deliciously cryptic--the type of convoluted mystique that's such a delight for theorists to unravel via soothing narration in a YouTube lore video. You piece the story together through snippets of lore dropped in dialogue and by unlocking codex pages, and even then the final result is up to interpretation. It's a challenging game to understand, and subsequently the difficulty of clawing your way through its gameplay emulates that struggle for understanding. Othercide's vibes are perfect.

In comparison, Ex Sanguis doesn't really have a story. There's very little lore provided and no codex to be seen. And while the narrator implies that the stillae are struggling against something, that challenge isn't reflected in the gameplay. I can feel the existence of a narrative, but nothing in the game is focusing it into some sort of recognizable tale.

Admittedly, that all could come later. Ex Sanguis launched into early access with only the first three bosses available and an initial handful of difficulty settings (I've done everything in about six hours), so the full game might tell a more interesting story.

Regardless, if you like tactics games, you should play Ex Sanguis. Well... you should play Othercide first and wonder how you missed it back in 2020. And then you should play Ex Sanguis--maybe it will have gotten a story update by then!