Six Ages 2: Lights Going Out

My spreadsheet instincts kicked in about twenty minutes into my first Sacred Time allocation and then promptly got humbled. Six Ages 2: Lights Going Out is the kind of strategy game where optimisation is a trap, because the moment you think you have a resource plan locked in, a Chaos incursion wipes out a quarter of your warriors and your carefully hoarded food reserves start looking critically thin. That tension is the whole point, and A Sharp has never executed it better than here. Mechanically, the game sits at a crossroads of turn-based clan management and interactive fiction. Each season you allocate resources across food production, magic, diplomacy, and military readiness, then events fire and demand your attention. Those events cover serious ground: undead raids, noble succession crises, dealings with gods who may or may not still be alive, and the slow creep of Chaos across a world that was already struggling. The clan ring - your council of advisors, each with a distinct personality - will push back on your decisions, and consistently overruling them causes friction that compounds over time. There is no tech tree to rush. Progress feels less like advancement and more like damage control, which is exactly the tone the apocalyptic Glorantha setting demands. Over 600 interactive scenes with system-driven outcomes give the whole thing genuine replay depth; two runs through the same scenario rarely produce identical story beats. The lineage here matters for context. Glorantha as a setting has roots going back decades, and the prior games - King of Dragon Pass and Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind - share the same DNA. Lights Going Out is playable as a standalone without that history, and the tutorial and tooltip system have been meaningfully improved over its predecessors. That said, reviewers consistently note the lore wall is real. The game asks you to take ancient polytheistic belief systems at face value as literal operating reality, and players who bounce off that framing tend to disengage quickly. Commit to the mindset, though, and the writing quality justifies every hour spent with the glossary. Rock Paper Shotgun labelled it a standout in a series that provides what they called "a wealth of thoughtful, amusing stories," which tracks with the Steam community's near-universal positive reception. One notable option for returning players: you can import a save from Ride Like the Wind, letting your prior clan's deeds become founding legends in this run, which is a clever bit of connective tissue. The honest criticism is that consequence transparency is inconsistent. Decisions occasionally carry payoffs or punishments that arrive dozens of in-game years later with no clear signal that they were connected to an earlier choice. For a strategy player who wants legible cause-and-effect, that opacity is occasionally maddening rather than atmospheric. The setting's grimness also means good outcomes are genuinely rarer than in prior entries - the best you can often achieve is a managed decline, which some players find unrewarding once the novelty of the scenario fades. No mod ecosystem to speak of, and no multiplayer; this is a quiet, single-player commitment. For the right player, though, Lights Going Out is the clearest expression yet of what this series does that nothing else does. The combination of hard resource numbers and story-driven, socially-constrained leadership creates decisions that feel like actual leadership rather than menu optimization. If you can read, tolerate ambiguity, and want a strategy game that respects your intelligence without handing you a win condition, this earns your time.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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