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The Occult Chronicles is a roguelike where you are play an ODD (Occult Defence Directorate) agent sent to investigate spooky lovecraftian goings on in an old house, however all the things like battles and evading traps are done through a card game. It has permadeath and procedurally generated mansions. The game is made by Cryptic Comet (who also made Solium Infernum) the website has a demo limited to 75 turns if you want to try the start http://www.crypticcomet.com/games/OC/Occult_Chronicles.html




Starting the Game


There are several missions available each has a different backstory and affects some of the enemies and encounters within the house.

Story Speed is pretty much game length. At set intervals (give or take a random number) you gain a story token, if you gain 12 tokens you lose.

Difficulty affects how much maximum health and sanity you can have, frequency of encounters and difficulty in winning encounters.

Game Mode is permadeath (reaper) or normal.



Character Creation


Here we have the Character Creation screen, some of it is pretty self explanatory.
Health & Sanity are pretty similar. If either reaches 0 you die or go crazy.
Swords affects physical combat.
Cups affects physical challenges to your body like surviving traps, resisting poison and fleeing.
Wands affects your ability to resist horror, decipher texts and use psychic abilities.
Pentacles affects arcane encounters and casting spells.

There is a hidden Luck stat that affects RNG. You can generally only have it altered by certain results when you win/lose encounters.

The number of points you can spend on stats differs between difficulty levels.



With Agent level points raising a stat to 3 with everything else at 2 and the leftovers added to health/sanity is pretty solid to get you into the game.



There are 3 Backgrounds for each Stat, they all give slightly different bonuses. Soldier is Swords focused so all the bonuses are combat based we even get +1 Swords! Edges are perks, Feats are abilities, Items like the gun can be used to make encounters easier. The Bone is a die used for rolls by abilities/items/feats relating to that stat.
Talismans are kind of weird and I'll show what they do later.






Always pick a bone different to the one you get from your background as you only ever need 1 per stat.



Edge descriptions are very dry and almost useless for new players, just see what they affect at the end and pick something you like. Here I pick something that helps Horror challenges, as I'm only average with 2 wands helping mitigate horror challenges is useful.




Game Screens


Here we have the main game screen, we can see our character in the top left with is talisman underneath. Below that is the menu/inventory and the map button.



Along the top of the inventory you can see 12 empty circles, these are where story tokens go. Each token can have a good or bad effect however only the most recent token's effect is active. You can hover over one to see the effect.

We have a shotgun with 6 ammo which causes 2 swords of encumbrance. The little 2/4 on the right shows our current limit. If we get into an encounter where we can use the shotgun the counter will turn green to remind us.



We also have the Critical Hit Feat, and 5 bravery. Bravery is the resource for feats. Critical hit also counts towards our Cup encumbrance.



Our Personnel File shows our backstory. The gold tokens are experience tokens, they can be gained after encounters or from completing quests. Once you fill out a line of counters you get the bonus. So it takes us 3 XP to get +1 Swords, and 4 XP to get another skill card. With a new skill card you get more things to spend XP on.



These are our perks, you can see their levels (all 1 for now) and if you hover over they give their dry advice!

Bones just shows your dice, Clues are modifiers you can find from exploring that will help you with the end game we have none to start off, Quests tracks quests we can pick up from encounters again at the start we have none.

Actual Gameplay!


You click a circles to move your agent and click doors to open them if unlocked. Exploring all the circles in rooms more gives you more chances to find hidden clues to help the endgame but also slows you down and can lead to you running into more repeated encounters.



A ? indicates something of interest.



With most things we first have to pass a Horror encounter.



Selecting the button at the bottom brings up our 'choice'. Other encounters may have multiple options but horror encounters have just the standard resist horror.

The 3 stat signs show which stats are used in the encounter, this one uses wands wands and Pentacles and you can see how it effects the encounter just under the flavour image.

The first is Difficulty and is modified by the first symbol on the button which is wands. Basic difficulty is 8 - our 2 wands = 6. We need 6 points to resist the horror. Lower is better.

The second is Tricks which is the number of face down cards that will be in the encounter. Higher Wands = higher amount of face down cards, although the number is affected by a modifier based upon the challenge. Higher is usually better.

The third is Draw which is how many cards we have in our hand. Similar to tricks in that higher is better.


Card Game!


Here we see the encounter screen. We have the 5 Trick cards face down along the top and our 4 Draw cards at the bottom. We also have the point counter and a FAIL button, if we get enough points it changes WIN.

Points are gained by revealing trick cards that are played to the board and then playing cards from your hand that
match the suit of the trick card that was revealed. If the card that you play from your hand has an equal or greater numerical value then you get trick points for both cards in the set.

If you do not have a card in your hand that matches the suit of a card already revealed then you may reveal another trick card by clicking on it. Keep revealing trick cards until you find a match or no longer have cards to reveal.

There are 4 suits Swords/Cups/Wands/Pentacles matching the 4 stats. Non face cards (number cards) are worth 1 point with higher face cards being worth more. There are also fancy super cards you can find/win that have the highest value so can beat any face cards.

We have a terrible hand, all numbers of the same suit.



There is not a single card of the same suit in the Trick cards so we lose and click the FAIL button like FAILures.





Here we have the results board. The more points you lose (or win) by the more you have to reveal. I've had to reveal 4 cards.

If you've won it is worth trying to get as high as possible to be able to get a higher number of reveals. You can only reveal good things if you win unless you overuse physic abilities.

Our failure cost us -3 Sanity leaving us at 7, if I'd have picked other cards we might have escaped with nothing but there are sometimes much worse things to reveal upon failure.



Anyway now the horror has passed we have more flavour text and several options. Being a physical character it'd be easier for us to pick one with swords icons.



Modified by our swords this should be easier!







Fuck. (I also forgot to use the gun or critical hit as you can see the Swords and Cups inventory bits are green.)

However we do see the our Talisman! Talismans negate the effect of the card they cover making it worth it to pick the cards they cover first. However each talisman has a chance to burn up after use, also each element of Talisman correlates to a Stat and if that stat is involved in the encounter it is more likely to turn up. Ours burns up after doing nothing useful.



We try again!
Notice that now instead of only having 4 tricks we have 5. Every time you lose and repeat the same option you gain +1 to draw and tricks until they reach 5 so provided you survived you can have a better chance at beating the challenge.







This time we win, only just though and so only turn over 2 cards and gain nothing. Swings and roundabouts really.

Next time: LP starts properly!