Farabel

My spreadsheet instincts kicked in the moment I understood Farabel's central conceit: your hero, Cendor, starts the campaign at full power and loses stats with every scenario you complete. Each battle you win sends you further back in time, stripping attack points, hit points, and abilities from the king rather than adding them. It is the inverse of every RPG progression loop you have ever played, and on paper it sounds like a genuinely fresh design problem to solve. The hex-grid battlefield is where most of your thinking happens. You command a mix of archers, knights, and ground troops, coordinating their different movement ranges and attack styles across scenarios that each have a bonus completion goal on top of the base victory condition. Cendor's in-battle time-rewind ability lets you restore a single unit to its position and health from the previous turn, usable a limited number of times per scenario, which creates tense little moments of damage mitigation and opportunistic double-attacks. The High Priestess sits alongside him as a healing resource, and between those two tools plus your unit mix, those are essentially all the levers you get. The roster does technically span 40 unit types and 18 spells and abilities across the full game, but any given scenario only hands you a fixed set of troops, so that variety is spread thin rather than layered. The honest criticism is that the strategic depth never quite catches up to the cleverness of the premise. The reverse levelling creates an escalating difficulty curve that works on paper, but the game compensates more through scripted difficulty spikes and surprise enemy deployments than through genuine tactical complexity around unit positioning or counters. There is no mid-scenario save, and some levels deal what reviewers have called cheap blows, punishing you for information you could not reasonably have had. The campaign runs to 26 battles but critics have consistently noted that the game rushes past its own mechanics before you fully internalise them, leaving the experience feeling shorter and lighter than the scenario count implies. Outside the campaign, Classic mode lets you set your own parameters, including race, budget, biome, and enemy type, giving the hex battles a more open sandbox feel. Defence mode is an endless survival format where the goal is simply to hold out as long as possible. Challenge mode added daily competitive battles in a post-launch update, which at least gives the core loop a reason to reload after finishing the story. None of these modes dramatically deepen the base mechanics, but they do extend playtime for anyone who clicks with the formula. For strategy newcomers, Farabel is actually a reasonable low-stakes entry point. The rules are clear, sessions are short, and the time-rewind mechanic functions as a built-in undo that softens the learning curve considerably. Veterans looking for the same kind of decision density they get from a proper tactics RPG will bounce off the relative shallowness within a few hours. The Steam review pool sits at roughly 71 percent positive on a small sample, which is an accurate signal: most people who finish it appreciate what it tried to do, but few feel compelled to revisit it.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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