Image: Hardlane Studio & Inner Pocket

After playing the Outcast Tales demo last month, I was pleasantly surprised. It was a slick little tactical roguelike with good comic-book art, tongue wedged firmly in cheek as it told its branching post-apocalyptic stories through Darkest Dungeon-adjacent combat and stat-based character interactions. I wasn't going to rush out to buy it, but it was sitting comfortably on my wishlist. I was quite surprised when I realized that it was out today and completely free. I guess that upgrades it to an easy recommendation.

The tone here is very Borderlands. Mankind was once great, smart, and technologically advanced. Then everyone killed each other (in very smart and technologically advanced ways), and now all that's left is a bleached desert and a whole lot of weirdoes and idiots who are killing each other in less smart, but still very technologically advanced ways.

The tone of the writing is very similar too - very irreverent, genre-savvy, and generally unbothered by human suffering on a planetary scale. You pick three characters and set out on a quest of misadventures through a branching web of encounters, levelling up, getting gear, developing the relationships between your characters, and working towards one of fifteen possible endings.

Combat is turn-based and tactical. A bit like Darkest Dungeon, but without the positioning aspect. In most cases, you're given a good look at what the enemies are going to be in the next turn, letting you know who should defend, who to stack buffs on, and when you need to taunt a heavy-hitter away from your damage-dealing min-maxed character with 3hp.

Early fights can drag on a bit before you get some damage spike options, with characters chipping away at each other 2-3hp at a time, but also means you're unlikely to lose your entire party in the first encounter. There's also a fourth party slot open for pets, letting you recruit some weird and scrunkly critters to help pick away at the enemy. So far, none of my runs have gone well enough to get me to ANY ending yet, but I'm too stubborn to lower the difficulty. Give it a try and see if you do better.

Outcast Tales is out now, and doesn't cost a dang thing. If you like Darkest Dungeon, Griftlands, or other story-heavy roguelikes, you can do a lot worse than this. Also might be worth checking out Burn With Me, an unusual narrative-heavy deckbuilder from the same publisher, Inner Pocket.