Othercide

Othercide is a 2020 turn-based tactics game from the French studio Lightbulb Crew. You command the Daughters, warriors raised by a figure called the Mother, against horrors breaking through from another world. The game is drawn almost entirely in black, white and red.

Turns run on a timeline: every action takes time, and units act in the order the timeline gives them, so you can see when an enemy will move and act before it does. Daughters do not heal naturally. The way to restore one is to sacrifice another, and the campaign is designed around repeated attempts, with some progress kept after each failure.

Its art direction is striking and its central rule is cruel and clever: you lose people on purpose to keep others alive. The timeline makes each turn a careful plan of who goes when, and its bosses are memorable.

It is repetitive, by design. The structure asks you to replay much of the campaign, and not everyone enjoys that.

Othercide keeps X-COM's small squad and the weight of losing soldiers, and turns the loss into a tool. X-COM made death something to avoid. Othercide makes it something you choose, which is a darker and more interesting idea.