Overfall

My spreadsheet instinct kicked in the moment I realized Overfall isn't really about finding the lost king. That objective is a timer, a pressure mechanic forcing you to prioritise which of the six warring races (Dwarves, Elves, Orcs, Goblins, Hollows, Forsaken) you're going to court before the Vorn fleet swarms the map and ends your run. Siding with any faction means actively losing reputation with its rival, and that tension is the actual strategic spine of the game. Pick your allegiances early and commit, because a scattered diplomatic approach bleeds days you don't have. The turn-based grid combat is where the mechanical depth lives. Each unit gets three action phases per turn, and the design strongly rewards chaining abilities across your party rather than playing each character in isolation. Nine base classes cover familiar archetypes (Fighter, Cleric, and so on), but the real decision-making happens in the equipment layer. Weapons swap out entire move-sets, and trinkets add conditional effects that interact in ways the game never fully explains upfront. That opacity is by design and by flaw: the AI holds its own and keeps early fights tense, but new players are dropped onto the overworld with almost no tutorial scaffolding and left to decode reputation gain, food management, and party composition through repeated death. The roguelike structure excuses this somewhat as each run unlocks new companions from a pool of 36 recruitable characters, and those carry-forward unlocks are the clearest progression loop the game offers. The writing punches well above the budget. Each island encounter is a self-contained visual-novel beat delivered via speech bubbles, ranging from genuinely funny to quietly melancholy. Choices inside those encounters affect battle initiation, faction standing, and loot, which makes diplomacy feel like a lateral combat option rather than a stat-check detour. The Story Builder mode, which lets players author and share custom quests through Steam Workshop, extends replayability in ways the base encounter pool cannot sustain indefinitely. Long-term players do eventually start cycling through familiar beats, so user-created content is the ceiling on how long this holds your attention. The elephant in the room is a key-revocation controversy from the post-launch period, where Pera Games revoked a batch of third-party keys after a publisher deal went sideways. Buyers who sourced keys from grey-market sites were caught in the crossfire. If your key comes from a legitimate partner store, this is a non-issue, but it is worth knowing the history. The hand-drawn art and soundtrack hold up well, and the deformed chibi character models have genuine charm once the initial strangeness wears off. Localization has occasional rough patches, particularly noticeable after several playthroughs, but nothing that derails the experience for most players. For strategy and roguelike players: the learning curve is real and the ending of a first run will feel anticlimactic. Stick with it past run two, dial in a faction focus, and the systems start clicking into a coherent and consistently satisfying loop.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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