Deep in an industrial labyrinth, taunted by an egomaniac CRT monitor, four puny humans find themselves facing down death. Barely armed and facing starvation, they must traverse through rooms, fighting the forces their captor has assembled, in order to try and survive the Despot’s Game.
As a rogue-like auto battler, gameplay consists of you gradually expanding your army, equipping them with better gear and buffs, as you delve deeper into the bowels of the dungeon. Before every fight, you have the chance to position your forces before you let go of the reins, and they fight against whatever your mechanical overlord has to throw at you. The reward for each conquest comes in the form of tokens, which you can use to bolster your forces and buy more equipment.
Life is cheap, two tokens to be precise, and success requires a brutal, analytic approach. Managing your food reserves against the potential for better equipment, or more soldiers, is key to your forces’ survival. An army marches on its stomach after all, but spend too much keeping them well fed and you risk falling behind the more difficult late game challenges.
As each run progresses, it all can become a delicate balancing act of investing in troops versus spending tokens on food. You could keep them fully fed and efficient in combat, but that could mean you miss out on extra mutations. These typically provide buffs to your unit’s stats, or alter the way in which certain classes function. Stacking these together you can create some powerful combinations, but spend too much on them, and you may find your army lacks numbers, or worse, you may end up trapped, your army too weak from hunger to continue. It’s at this point that the game gleefully reminds you that your soldiers can make for a great source of meat.
After clearing the first couple of floors, my small army had some decent equipment and a strategy consistent enough that I only had to make minor adjustments to their placements. The constant stream of violent encounters in similar looking rooms and the steady thrum of the synthwave music quickly gets you into the classic rogue-like groove of ‘just one more encounter’.
This is good because reaching the endgame during each run is often a commitment of well over an hour, and there’s no ability to save your progress. Once you load in, you are committed to seeing things through. On multiple occasions during my time with Despot’s Game, a run would take longer than expected and if the end was not in sight, I was forced to abandon all my progress.
Industrious and grim, the cycle of violence and starvation should be horrifying, but the stripped-down pixel art, and the muted CRT tones, highlighted with the occasional strip of color, remind you this is all just a game. The game’s tongue is rammed firmly in its cheek, with a dark and downright goofy sense of humor. Surreal, with one foot firmly in pop culture, my rag-tag band have found themselves having conversations with death, helping a sentient sword in its mission of revenge and teleported to the moon for a conversation with the legally distinct Dr. Brooklyn.
Despite its best attempts to present a brutal and callous world, successfully fighting your way to the end is actually quite an easy task. I managed to seize victory on my very first attempt, even though I completely misunderstood how the hunger mechanics worked.
As the final boss fell before my army’s might, I found myself feeling disappointed with the lack of challenge, until I realized that it was to allow easy access to the Games’ true test. King-of-the-Hill, where my final army faces off against the surviving forces of other players, features leaderboards that operate in month-long seasons and, once you’ve completed your first run, sprint mode allows you to assemble armies more efficiently to try and eke out a higher ranking. It’s here where the game really starts to come to life, rewarding you for having a deeper understanding of all the different mechanics involved.
To aid your attempts, Despot’s Game gives you encyclopedic access to all the different weapon and mutation options at your disposal, to make planning builds a smooth process. Certain combinations of class abilities and mutations make for some seriously broken builds to propel you up the rankings, but after getting some more runs under my belt, I still felt in the dark regarding the most powerful strategies.
I found myself missing the ability to look at my previous squads, to help pick apart what it was that made them successful. Similarly, there’s no way to rewatch the fast-paced and chaotic king of the hill battles to work out how I lost. This necessitates a frustrating trial and error approach and hours upon hours of grinding in order to experiment with different combinations. Some may consider this part of the fun, but I couldn’t help but feel my time was being wasted.
Aside from this, a Director’s Cut mode provides a more difficult PvE challenge, a robust single player experience and alternative to the online PvP. Here, the difficulty ramps up to insane levels, making every decision a question of survival rather than a training exercise for your next army.
Getting stuck into a run, the constant thrum of synth absorbs you into a hypnotic headspace, I found myself growing callous as I sent these poor little guys into a seemingly endless sequence of battles and death. The similar rooms blur into one long corridor, an endless, brutal climb towards that next spot on the leaderboard. In a moment of clarity, breaking free from my fugue, the true dystopian horror of my actions became clear to me. I had become a cog in the machine, the larger meat grinder churning up people for entertainment. If only there was some analogy I could make to modern life.…
Oh well, I just gained two more positions on the leaderboard. Time for another run!