Image: Death Kumiai & Flashlight Games

Sometimes a game's premise is all I need to hear to get excited. While turn-based roguelite dungeon crawlers are ten a penny now, Annihilated is more focused on telling a story - equal parts visual novel and RPG. Forget about slaying the demon lord and rescuing the kingdom here. Your goal is to rescue a failed hero's party one member at a time, and after a catastrophic defeat that left them trapped and broken, none of them are doing well at all, mentally or physically speaking.

The legendary hero can only say 'Yes' or 'No'; the powerful warrior is trapped in a ball-jointed doll's body, without muscles or blood, and the mage has been stripped of her magic. The only one who seems in good spirits is the priest, who has just completely lost their marbles and is howling the praises of some forgotten dark god of the depths. And you - a generic soldier - are the last surviving member of the rescue team that was sent in to find out what happened to these people.

The good news is that as part of the hero's party, you'll just respawn when you die! Less good is that it means you're trapped to die infinitely along with the increasingly mentally broken party. So you pick someone to take with you and try to fight your way back to the surface, unraveling the story and working through the issues of each character as you spend time with them. Even from the little bit I've played (a couple runs with the Mage), this one's tugging at the heartstrings, as you try to juggle practicality, emotional support for your chosen partner, and the dwindling sanity scores of everyone involved.

Combat here is simple, yet interesting stuff, and all centered on limited resources. Items looted or stolen from monsters can only be used a limited number of times before they break, or can be smashed intentionally to invoke extra powers. Interestingly, there's also the option to pick between probability- or timing-based combat, with the latter giving more consistent results but only if you're quick on the draw. Some attacks have the cursor fly past the success part real fast, or require you to rapid-fire hits with precise rhythm.

I'm pretty sure that success on a first run is either impossible or requires improbable luck, but this is a roguelite about people stuck in a painful loop, so that checks out. As you win fights and break items, you accrue the 'curse' currency, which can be exchanged during a run at rest points to heal or upgrade, or spent at the end of a run to buy a deck of items to bring on your next adventure. Plus, each party member you can choose (you're only running a two-person party here) has their own set of mechanics and a full, branching story arc of their own.

Of course, knowing visual novels in general, I'd bet money that there's a true finale to work towards if you can save every character, but given that I've yet to save even one, that's a dream for later. This is definitely one I want to play more of - the art is charming, the music is good, the story is intriguing, and I really want to see what the heck is up with the priest (who keeps offering me salvation if I swear fealty to their god, which I keep rejecting) eventually, but that's for future Dominic to worry about. There is one fly in the ointment, though.

My main gripe is that the game's localization seems to have been done on a shoestring budget. The story as a whole? Interesting! There are some really good lines here and there, but there are also an egregious number of typos, strange turns of phrase, and fumbling around pronouns, which is all the more funny a problem given that the game lets you set your own in the menu.

It's all indicators of a human-made but rushed or amateurish translation (which I'll still take any day over a bland machine-made one), but it takes some of the shine off the experience unless you can read Japanese. It hasn't prevented me from playing and enjoying Annihilated, but it's something I'd love to see tuned up and improved in patches. Still, it doesn't seem to have hurt the experience too much for the initial handful of user reviews, who seem to be vibing with the game.

If that's not a dealbreaker for you, Annihilated is out now on Steam for £15.25/$17, with a 10% launch discount running until November 23rd. There's also a small discount if you own the post-apocalyptic puzzle adventure Alice's World.