V: Tactical Breach Wizards

Recommended by: my beautiful Mourning Star

Tactical Breach Wizards is a 2024 strategy game (in the XCOM sense, not in the Starcraft sense, the Fire Emblem sense, or the Stellaris sense, wow what an overloaded term; okay Wikipedia says "turn-based tactics", let's go with that and get out of this parenthetical) from Suspicious Developments. It's the third game in their extremely loose "Defenestration Trilogy", alongside Gunpoint (2013) and Heat Signature (2017). (The game even helpfully defines "defenestrate" when it becomes relevant. :3)

It also absolutely rules.

I was introduced to this game by my at-the-time girlfriend (we didn't break up, we're just MARRIED NOW???), and all of my memories of my early exposure to it are of em sitting on a couch with me and either feeling incredibly pleased with eir strategy game turns or absolutely cackling at the game's writing. So I was quite primed to like this, but I'm happy to report that it feels very justified, and that I'd happily recommend this to anyone who even remotely thinks they'd enjoy it.

The best way to summarize my time with Tactical Breach Wizards is, weirdly enough, just "I never got tired of it" [extremely affectionate]. Even by the end of the game, I was very pleased with myself any time that I'd find a new and exciting way to throw someone out a window, or body-check them into a wall from all the way across the map, or throw a grenade that bonked them one square left directly into a very XCOM-esque overwatch'd tile. During the final boss fight, I told MS "I have the opportunity to do the funniest thing right now", gathered my entire party around the boss, and then threw a "deals damage equal to the number of people in the blast, including your party members, who this grenade ignores" grenade directly into my own party. Ey asked if I'd taken the upgrade that let me do it twice in a fight. I had. I threw the second grenade into my own party again on the next turn. It was even funnier the second time.

The game, on its hardest difficulty, feels quite difficult but never, ever unfair, and it would be hard for it to feel unfair, because zero actions are committed until you hit "end turn", and you can see the results of any action you take, as well as undo any action that you take, until you do end a turn and commit to "okay, these enemies are dead, I took this much damage, my party members are here and here and here." Directly enabled by this (and by the fact that Tactical Breach Wizards has zero RNG) is the fact that things like "end the fight on turn one", "take zero damage", and "don't let an enemy take an action" are quite common, and stages often just play out like little micro-puzzles. If you do something and it has an unintended result? Rewind, try something else. Be creative. Be unhinged. Throw grenades at your own party before intentionally electrocuting your healer so she can shunt the damage off to someone on the other side of the map. Play the special edition with the developer commentary. Pick up the developer commentary and throw it at an enemy for one damage. It's all normal, just have fun~

The writing, as evidenced by my wife's cackling, is also legitimately fantastic; the developer has spoken in interviews about how, at one point, he wanted to make the main character a police officer, but rewrote her in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder to be a private investigator and to reframe the story away from having a cop party member. Between this and the fact that the game's fourth party member, Dall, is a "Rebel Riot Priest" fighting an oppressive state religion in the Fantasy Middle East (where much of the back half of the game takes place), the game's politics are very unsubtle, but it honestly feels great and never really on the nose. Dall, especially, is incredibly blunt about living in an oppressive regime and how useless her allies have been in a way that I know I have certainly wished I could be about being several kinds of queer in Current Year, and which I suspect will resonate with a lot of the people reading this.

It's honestly impressive to me how deftly I feel this game is written, because the core premise of "what if wizards dressed in tacticool outfits, complete with wand and staff sniper scopes and silencers, and had wizard SWAT teams" is completely bananas. Nevertheless, a game with achievement descriptions like "let the Less Lethal Pyromancer get hit by ghost traffic" and "knock the Traffic Warlock into a Death's Door" also inexplicably manages to pull off a rather competent story about trauma, regret, and an international coup. Suffice to say that I really, really liked this game. No further notes.