HomeNewsTarnished Blood
Tarnished Blood is Darkest Dungeon meets Monster Hunter with a fancy timeline mechanicAnd there’s a demo
And there’s a demo
Image credit:Galaktus/Nakayama Games
Image credit:Galaktus/Nakayama Games
If you’d told me back in 1999 that a rudimentary grasp of sound editing software would stand me in surprisingly good stead as astrategygame player, I’d have asked you who the hell you are and what you’re doing in my house. But in the years that followed, after you’d been sent to the slammer for crashing through my window bellowing about cheap Audible subscriptions, I might have checked out games likeGhost TrickandPhantom Brigade- each sort of an exercise in placing actions on a timeline like audio layers to produce a winning composition - and thought “hey, that hysterical burglar was onto something”.
I wouldn’t say there’s anabundanceof games in which you place actions on timelines, mind you. But those that do exist are neat, as Marge Simpson would say. TakeTarnished Blood.
In Tarnished Blood - why yes, itisa dark fantasyRPG- you lead a group of intrepid human warriors who are trying to keep their settlement alive in a world filled with hideous, hand-drawn beasties twenty times their size. A snippet fromthe Steam blurb: “No atrocity is considered taboo in the world where gargantuan bloodthirsty Maultigores roam the valleys, and the deceitful Celestials control the time-space continuum.” Righty-ho then.
There’s aDarkest Dungeon-style roguelike campaign loop - kill one of the aforesaid vicious leviathans, who range from relatively unthreatening rat ogres to nasty cannibal plants and many-armed cosmic gods, and you can use its hacked-off pieces to improve town facilities and shore up your fragile enclave of humanity. The game also features a traits-and-traumas system reminiscent of Darkest Dungeon’s positive and negative quirks.
Tarnished Blood TrailerWatch on YouTube
Tarnished Blood Trailer
I’ve written all this based on the tutorial mission. Tarnished Blood looks to get properly grim and gory deeper in, with characters receiving terrible injuries (including amputated limbs and “mutilated genitalia”, though genitalia aren’t actually depicted according to the content warning). Hunters may also develop conditions such as bipolar disorder and yeah, I’m not sure I trust a game with giant rat ogres to do subjects like that justice. But I’ve definitely enjoyed hopping my characters around the timeline, sprinkling behemoths with DMG as though soundtracking the kicks and punches in a martial arts film. The full game is out Q2 2024 and you canfind a demo on the Steam page.
