Despot’s Game is a rogue-like battle simulation game from Konfa Games. You control a band of useless humans who have woken up in a bizarre other-worldly labyrinth with no memories, some weapons and only one goal – survive. Unfortunately, achieving that goal is not really on the table as sacrifice is the name of the game. You’ll build up your army, equip and train them for battle and then let them loose, hoping that your army will kill all of the enemy troops before they kill all of yours. 

Aesthetically, Despot’s Game draws a lot from two of my favourite rogue-likes of all time: The Binding of Isaac and FTL: Faster than Light. It also has theming similarities to ‘the thing that all journalists have to compare all things to in late 2021’ – Squid Game. But despite some similar vibes, Despot’s Game is 100% its own thing, maintaining some seriously innovative gameplay and styling choices. I’ve been thinking of it as what would happen if the FTL developers went through a horror-movie style world-outlook-altering event that left them scarred and jaded and then decided to develop a sequel to their crew-managing genre-defining smash-hit. I think that’s enough hyphens for one sentence.

You don’t control your army directly. That would be far too easy for them – having a gaming god like you in control of all their actions. Instead, all of your battles are fought by the game’s AI. Each of your humans attack their nearest enemy, attacking and using their special abilities as often as they can. The one thing you do control is the arrangement of your army so you can put your strongest melee fighters closest to the spawn point of the enemies and keep your ranged fighters and healers at the back of the pack. This does feel a little frustrating at the start of the game, where you only have a few humans to throw against the hordes of enemies and where you desperately want to tell your medic to heal fighters rather than trying to use their stretcher to beat enemies over the head. But, as the game progresses, it is not feasible for you to individually control an army of dozens of humans in the fast-paced combat of Despot’s Game, so the computer taking charge does make a lot of sense.

To give your army a chance at beating the overwhelming numbers and behemoth-like power of the enemy units, you’ll need to strengthen their numbers and strengthen their strength. As you travel from room to room through the labyrinth there are several ways you can level up. When you defeat a room, you are almost always presented with a shop where you can spend the Tokens you collected in the fight. Within these shops, you can buy naked humans incredibly cheaply, much like on certain websites on the internet. However, these humans are very weak and puny without a specialism, so you can also buy weapons to equip your humans. The type of weapon you equip to a person determines their type (fighter, ranged, medic, etc) and the more humans you have in each type, the more effective that type becomes. You’ll come across rooms that provide a special ability to a class, for example healing for a percentage of damage dealt. You can also spend Tokens in a tech tree to level up all of your characters to use their abilities more often, have more health, etc.

All of this comes together to put you, as a player, in more of a middle management position, where you’re controlling the training and key competencies of your workforce rather than micromanaging their everyday combat. This is a great set-up that I’m very much on board with, but I don’t think it would hurt to add a little more complexity to this management system. What I’ve described above is a comprehensive view of all the tools you have at your disposal and, as they are the only way you interact with the game, I could definitely take more facets and intricacies to their deployment.

The final way you can impact your army is through special events that occur when you move between floors of the labyrinth. These events are little story-focused random encounters where you’re given a set-up and have to choose one of the options of how to interact with the situation. Think of the multiple-choice text adventure sections in FTL and you’re on the right track – which is great because those sections are excellent and this feels very similar. Your choices can reap rewards like bonus tokens or weapons but can also lead to you losing a faithful member of your army if you don’t choose correctly.

I’m not saying that Despot’s Game is better than FTL, firstly because they’re different enough that it’s difficult to draw a direct comparison and, secondly because ending a sentence with ‘…is better than FTL’ is punishable by death in my household unless the phrase is immediately preceded by the word ‘nothing’. That being said, Despot’s Game sure does channel some very similar energy to FTL and, if like me, you’ve played FTL to death and you’re itching for some new content then Despot’s game will certainly scratch that itch. It’ll scratch it so hard you’ll have skin sloughing off like someone with eczema midway through being dusted by Thanos. I had a really great time with Despot’s Game. It has vibes of some brilliant games that I especially love and, while it does lack a little complexity, it is certainly a fun and challenging rogue-like romp that’s easy to pick up and play. If you can get over the ease with which you’re prepared to sacrifice individual members of your army for the good of the whole, there are definitely worse ways to wear away your finite hours in this mortal realm than playing Despot’s Game.

Nightmare on Elm Street is a terrifying film. On its own, the notion of a man with too little flesh and too many knives murdering me in my dreams is plenty scary, and the movie knows just how to twist this idea, taking it places that never fail to shock or awe. I can’t help but feel, however, that Freddy Kreuger would be significantly less frightening if his pants fell down every time he tried to chase someone down a winding hallway or moonlit street. Sunshine Manor is a game I frequently caught with its jeans around its ankles. It’s survival horror by way of the Super Nintendo, and while it seems intent on frightening its players, its attempts at eliciting a sense of dread are undercut more often than not by a lack of tonal clarity and near-constant technical frustrations.

The year is 1980. You play as a young girl named Ada out on halloween night with her friends, so naturally it isn’t long before you find yourself trapped inside an ominous mansion, forced to navigate the dastardly puzzles and grotesque apparitions the house has on offer. This story’s protagonist is Sunshine Manor’s most confusing narrative decision, and the one chiefly responsible for the game’s ever-present jarring oscillation between humorous and eerie. The vast majority of Ada’s lines are prompted when the player interacts with objects in the environment, and tend to express a detached curiosity in the pervasive gore and death comprising her surroundings. Not only do these insights into the game’s world sap most scenes of any discernible emotion, but they make me question the entirety of Sunshine Manor’s intent as an artistic work. At one point, after ruthlessly dismembering a comparatively docile demonic entity, Ada proclaims “Holy moly, that was insane!” Is this meant as an earnest depiction of a small child reacting to such an event, or as comedic relief designed to erase any horror that might’ve been briefly achieved? There are numerous scenes throughout the game unquestionably intended to be humorous, and yet still countless others which strive to be taken seriously but come off just as silly. Perhaps this inconsistency is an elaborate attempt at subverting the genre itself, meticulously constructed to create the very sense of uncertainty I’m criticizing. But if this is the case, and Sunshine Manor has executed its vision flawlessly, I feel that vision accomplishes less than committing to either horror or parody would. 

Mechanically, Sunshine Manor is eager to dip its toes into all of horror’s staples, and its attempts at variety succeed about as often as they fail. Your time in the mansion is primarily spent solving inventory-based puzzles from a 2D top-down perspective, but there’s a sort of rudimentary combat system in place as well, which – while by no means complex – serves as an intriguing addition to the archetypal “walk slowly from creepy foyer to creepy kitchen” formula. Your actions are governed by a stamina bar, which you can deplete by either dashing or attacking. The former grants you a sudden burst of speed, but proves risky as there might be an ambush waiting around the next corner, and if you’ve exhausted your stamina you’ll be left temporarily defenseless. This dynamic provides a palpable tension as you traverse the manor’s creaking floorboards and overgrown gardens, intent on making optimal use of your limited move set. While the puzzles here are engaging enough, the act of solving them is made a chore by the mansion’s sprawl. Rooms are vast and often all but empty, and despite having to visit every inch of the place in order to uncover its secrets, the house offers little in the way of branching paths or hidden shortcuts. There is no option for strategically planning routes toward your desired wing of the manor, and thus no reason to care about or familiarize yourself with its intricacies beyond the bare minimum required to get from point A to point B. 

Alongside exploration and puzzle solving, boss fights complete Sunshine Manor’s mechanical repertoire. These bouts are inserted sporadically throughout Ada’s journey, punctuating each of its roughly five narrative sections. Despite their inventive visual and auditory design, these encounters, too, extend well past fun and firmly into tedium, necessitating survival of the same two or three attack patterns for minutes on end, repeated ad nauseum. Similarly to the game’s writing, I feel these battles have a spark of passion at their core, made dim by a lack of focus, or perhaps a focus on too much at once.  

Like its titular house, Sunshine Manor seems to be the victim of a terrible curse. No, it didn’t delete my desktop applications or make blood spurt from my laptop’s USB ports, but I couldn’t help feeling like the game’s multitude of bugs were crafted by some gnarled witch specifically to torment me. Certain items inexplicably disappeared from my inventory, while others duplicated themselves, taking up slots I needed for puzzle-necessary objects. The title screen itself is almost entirely non-functional, as its “continue” feature simply launched me to the beginning of a new game each time I attempted to employ it. This particular issue was compounded by the way Sunshine Manor handles death. When your health is depleted, you’re sent back to the menu screen rather than to a checkpoint, so each time I died – because I couldn’t load my game from the menu – I was forced to begin anew, watch a roughly three-minute opening cutscene, and then manually load my save before being able to play on. I put in considerable effort to be frightened, to be engaged amidst the frustration and the artificial difficulty that arose from these glitches, but Freddy Kreuger ceases to be threatening once you’re helping him pull up his khakis.

Developer Fossil Games’ latest foray into pixelated perversion is an odd beast. There is undeniable talent on display in Sunshine Manor’s art and especially its sound design, which enlivens a setting made otherwise redundant by the past decade’s countless other 8-bit horror escapades. This passion, though, is so often overwritten, so often siphoned of identity by a game reluctant to pick a direction and stick to it unwaveringly.