We Are The Caretakers

My spreadsheet instincts told me this one was worth a proper sit-down: a squad-management RPG where the design brief came from real-world anti-poaching fieldwork rather than a genre checklist. That hook is real, and it does produce mechanics you won't find elsewhere. You play as the Conductor, assembling up to nine squads from a roster of over a hundred recruitable characters, each carrying distinct traits, abilities, and job classes drawn from more than thirty options. Between missions you run a headquarters loop that feels like a stripped-down XCOM base: detain captured poachers, interrogate them, push tech upgrades, and build out your organisation before deploying back to the field. The campaign spans several eras - the game's term for chapters - and escalates from local poaching operations to a full alien-threat scenario as an energy barrier over the fictional nation of Shadra falls. The structural ambition is real, and so is the aesthetic. The Afrofuturist visual identity, developed with a former Blizzard artist, is striking enough that reviewers consistently noted it as the game's clearest strength. The soundtrack reinforces it well, layering synth and traditional-folk textures in a way that makes the loading screens actually worth sitting through. Where the game earns genuine credit from a strategy perspective is its dual-meter combat system: enemies carry both a Stamina bar and a Willpower bar, and depleting either one opens a finisher window. You can wound, detain, or recruit defeated opponents rather than simply eliminating them, and choices made in combat ripple into a reputation system that affects future mission opportunities and even enemy threat levels. The idea of consequence-driven combat in a conservation context is genuinely smart design. Here is where I have to be straight with you, though. The depth promised by those systems does not fully materialise. Tooltip coverage is sparse - stats like mental defense and charisma are left undefined, which matters when you are trying to build squads with any intentionality. The combat balance is too forgiving on default difficulty; area-of-effect abilities carry no cooldown or resource cost, which means there is rarely a reason to think carefully about ability selection once you have identified your strongest moves. Reviewers across the board noted that things feel repetitive after the second era, with mission objectives cycling and the tech upgrade tree lacking the branching depth the squad size implies. The animations are rudimentary, clipping is common, and multiple outlets flagged crash-to-desktop instability that felt like a game that left Early Access ahead of schedule. The map UI also reads closer to a mobile game than a PC strategy title. For the strategy audience specifically: do not come in expecting Darkest Dungeon's roster permadeath tension or XCOM's spatial positioning logic. Combat positioning is largely irrelevant - this plays closer to a JRPG battle screen than a tactics grid, with attack, heal, and buff choices mattering more than formation. The day-night cycle on field maps does add some time-pressure to objective prioritisation, which is a decent wrinkle, and running multiple squads simultaneously gives the mission layer more texture than a single-team deployment would. Start on hard difficulty - the default setting removes most of the decision pressure before you have had a chance to feel it. There is no mod ecosystem to speak of, and the campaign is linear with no procedural replay hook. At around six to ten hours of content across roughly twenty-plus missions, it is a compact experience. We Are The Caretakers is an earnest, distinctive project from a small team that drew on genuine conservation research to build something the genre had not seen before. The ideas deserve a second game with a bigger budget behind them. As it stands, the concept outpaces the execution at almost every turn, and the crash frequency at launch was unacceptable for a full release. If the stability has improved in subsequent patches and you are curious about the setting, there is a worthwhile few sessions here. Go in with calibrated expectations and pick hard mode from the first screen. Diego, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Playable.

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