‘Tarnished Blood’ Manages Stategic Decisions to the Millisecond

Tarnished Blood doesn’t let you take a single moment of its deadly battles for granted, requiring you plan every single step to win.

When I tried this game out at PAX East 2024, I was intrigued by its concept. In this game, you can full control of the flow of time, able to shift it forward and backwards frame by frame. While having that degree of time control, all I had to do was beat up a single big monster. Surely if I could shuffle time around any way I pleased, I could find a route to down a monster no matter how strong it was, right? NOPE.

When you can plan every minute step of combat, what that means is the game’s creators can challenge you in all sorts of ways throughout the fight, making a bloody battle against a hellish monster feel like an intricate puzzle. If you leap and swing your sword, will you get swatted out of the air? Will you get hit by debris while the monster is flailing about? Will you make the monster react in a way that opens you up to get hit a few moments later? Since you have such a degree of control over how time flows, the game pushes you with constant shifts in combat and all kinds of danger to put yourself into.

It’s the sort of thing that seems like it might get complicated when you realize you have to lead a whole party of warriors, but controlling the game is fairly intuitive. Each character has a bar of actions and timings, and you lay them out one by one with the exact moment you want to make one of your characters act. This is where things get complex, though, as the actions of one character might keep them safe but make the monster react in a way that harms another character. You need to carefully choreograph where each person moves and how they fight if you want the party to survive.

Tarnished Blood is a deeply compelling puzzle of a bloody strategy game, and you’ll enjoy a great deal of time planning out your victories. I’m excited to see how much more gruesome and difficult this game will get throughout Early Access.

Tarnished Blood is available now on Steam Early Access.

About The Author

Joel Couture

Joel has been covering indie games for various sites including IndieGames.com, Siliconera, Gamasutra, Warp Door, CG Magazine, and more over the past seven years, and has written book-length studies on Undertale and P.T.. Joel is constantly on the lookout for digital experiences that push the boundaries of what games can be, and seeks to delve into the creative process, meanings, and emotion labor that goes into the work of artists worldwide.

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