After a hard day’s editing articles about three Disco Elysium spiritual successors – each more politically outspoken than the last, in a kind of Sophisticated Pooh collage of escalating Marxism – I like to kick back with a nice chill game about Lovecraftian space monsters.
That game is Konafa Game’s Starless Abyss – a roguelite tactical deckbuilder published by Descenders and Yes, Your Grace outfit No More Robots. It puts you in command of a fleet of upgradeable spaceships, who must chase away invading Eldritch aliens hex by hex… and also, hex by hex. This is both hex-based and a game in which you can cast hexes, you see. Oh, don’t look at me like that. I had to distil several manifestos into an article half-an-hour ago. I need this.
In Starless Abyss you play a Proxima, the possibly-human agent of a motley crew of scientists and occultists called Counter Horror. There are five Proximas in all, each with different skills and attributes. There are over 160 cards to discover, divided between six faction groupings, and each campaign run spans three acts with several randomly selected bosses. Visually, it’s a writhing pixelart buffet of toothy tentacles and flying eyeballs and spacetime rifts, set to menacing chipset. Here’s a trailer.
And here’s a touch more detail on how you’ll and expand and tune up your fleet. This being a labour of Lovecraft, it’s of no huge surprise to learn that you can prevail over the monsters by driving yourself absolutely mad.
Start your run playing ‘Lucid Proxima’ and command a fleet of ships through battle across the universe. Successful missions reward you with new artifacts to upgrade your ships, D.I.C.E to help sway pivotal moments between missions or cards from different factions, which can be collected, combined and combo-ed to help destroy the eldritch beasts. Beware though! The closer you get to the ultimate Outer Gods, the more your Proxima’s sanity depletes. Or embrace your insanity and harness the power of the occult using annihilating Ritual Cards to take down your opposition.
It’s out in 2025 – here’s the Steam page with more. I’m kind of burned out on sci-fi deckbuilders after Breachway, but as a Homeworld: Cataclysm cultist, I do like me some cosmic body horror in space. If you like the cut of these screaming entrails, may I also recommend R-Type Tactics?