Cosmic Horror

After a hard day's editing articles about three Disco Elysium spiritual successors - each more politically outspoken than the last, in a kind of Sophisticated Pooh collage of escalating Marxism - I like to kick back with a nice chill game about Lovecraftian space monsters.

That game is Konafa Game's Starless Abyss - a roguelite tactical deckbuilder published by Descenders and Yes, Your Grace outfit No More Robots. It puts you in command of a fleet of upgradeable spaceships, who must chase away invading Eldritch aliens hex by hex... and also, hex by hex. This is both hex-based and a game in which you can cast hexes, you see. Oh, don't look at me like that. I had to distil several manifestos into an article half-an-hour ago. I need this.

In Starless Abyss you play a Proxima, the possibly-human agent of a motley crew of scientists and occultists called Counter Horror. There are five Proximas in all, each with different skills and attributes. There are over 160 cards to discover, divided between six faction groupings, and each campaign run spans three acts with several randomly selected bosses. Visually, it's a writhing pixelart buffet of toothy tentacles and flying eyeballs and spacetime rifts, set to menacing chipset. Here's a trailer...