In a time filled with longer video games and shorter attention spans, it can be difficult to grab and maintain a gamer’s consciousness. Trying to create an experience that is accessible, has meaningful levels of depth, and can be enjoyed in bite sized increments is no easy task. Mistover is a new rogue-like dungeon crawling RPG from developer Krafton Union Games that ambitiously seeks to provide this, and more, for its audience.
The world of Arta has a history of being overtaken by an apocalyptic mist filled with terrifying monsters known as Espers. This Pillar of Despair has almost pushed the land to extinction but has been held at bay by a band of fighters known as the Expedition Corps. You awaken as a Missing One – a civilian who has gotten caught in the Pillar and are suffering from severe amnesia as a side effect of the mysterious mist. Rescued by a group of soldiers, you are quickly drafted into the Expedition Corps and tasked with recruiting your own group of fighters to prevent the Pillar from enveloping the land any further. If you think this all sounds familiar and underwhelming, we’d probably agree with you. The story remains derivative and merely set dressing for the surprisingly meaty gameplay.
Where the story fails to intrigue, the characters and personalities succeed. Taking on a distinct Eastern meets Western hand drawn aesthetic, the gloomy backdrops of Arta are starkly contrasted by the overly energetic anime personas that populate the game. While backstories of Arta’s inhabitants aren’t fleshed out, their charisma explodes off the screen in a way synonymous with Japanese animation. Unless you speak Japanese, you’ll need to keep the subtitles on as there is no English voice work. But this only serves to authenticate and complement the art style.
Traversing dungeon areas requires meticulous management of light and starvation. These resources are measured using Fullness and Luminosity meters. The two gauges quickly deplete with each step taken in the grid based environments and must be carefully nurtured. Luminosity and Fullness can be replenished on the fly by consuming food and light seeds. But these commodities are scarce as a limited number can be taken onto expeditions and even fewer are looted. Contaminated food and light can be found, but consuming them means the party is at risk of inheriting a negative status effect. To be honest, when these attrition mechanics were first introduced in the tutorial, we were sure they were going to be a headache. However, in practice, they skillfully add a meaningful level of difficulty and decision making when moving around dungeons. Each step you take has to be carefully scrutinized, especially towards the end of an expedition.
Inside randomly generated dungeons the main goal revolves around plundering lootable objects, illuminating light flowers, and fighting off enemies. You’ll often enter hostile environments with a mission that focuses on one of these aforementioned tasks. However, even after you’ve satisfied a mission condition, you’ll want to stick around to clear as much of a map as possible. Every chest left unopened, enemy left undefeated or light flower left dim causes a doomsday clock to tick ever closer to striking midnight. Once that happens, the Pillar of Despair erupts, and it’s game over. That is to say, it’s literally game over since there is no restarting from a checkpoint, no retention of loot or experience – only the option to start over. This keeps the stakes high, but may drive players away too soon after their first unsuccessful run.
Progressing through the different environments was enjoyable and satisfying. Pulling up your mini map to see that your party had cleared out almost everything there was to see is a challenging feat that remains rewarding throughout. There is an impressive amount of depth in Mistover’s gear system, meaning that players will be driven to collect everything before Fullness and Luminosity runs out. Furthermore, dungeon runs can take anywhere between five minutes to half an hour. This is a relatively small investment of time and results in a game that is quick and easy to jump in and out of.
Encounters play out with enemies in standard turn-based RPG fare. You’ll take turns issuing attack, defend, and buffing commands to your team of up to five playable characters. Where Mistover changes things up slightly is in the use of positioning mechanics. Each battle places you and your enemies on separate three by three grids. You can use turns to move your characters mid battle or strategically place them prior to entering a fight. This adds a unique layer of strategy as abilities can only be triggered if your characters are placed in the correct spot. Rarely will all of a character’s abilities be available in a single spot, but the middle lane is, by far, the most popular. Players will have to carefully select who takes up those valuable middle slots. We chose to place our stronger damage dealing fighters in these positions, and relegate healers to the rear.
Two characters in the group can also team up to initiate stunning combo attacks. The only stipulation is they have to be in the correct position relative to one another. These deal huge amounts of damage, usually to multiple foes, and look visually stunning on screen. You’ll often have to plan these moves in advance as stronger enemies seem to target characters working together to knock them out of position. Nevertheless, successfully pulling these off is one of the most satisfying parts of the game and never gets old.
Combat in Mistover further attempts to differentiate itself from the genre norm with the sheer amount of status effects that are thrown around in a fight. Enemies can inflict bleeds for damage over time, stuns that will cause individual characters to lose turns, and knock backs to push you out of a desired position on the grid. This should add tactical planning but often makes fights far too chaotic. For one, the obnoxious number of random sound effects coming from several different places was an absolute sensory overload. Further to this, when we finished a battle, it took an annoyingly long amount of time to try and figure out who had what negative effect and how to quell that debuff before we could move on.
Another aspect that helps Mistover to stand out from the crowd is the diverse set of character types available to take into battle. The developers have put a distinct twist on the standard RPG archetypes that makes your party look like a band of anime misfits. A personal favorite of ours was the Werewolf. This character focuses on damage and uses up close and personal slashing attacks to hack away huge amounts of hit points from enemies. The Ronin was another go to character. This wandering samurai builds up attack points with successful hits (similar to Boost Points from Octopath Traveller) and can unleash increasingly powerful attacks with each additional point. Character design also plays a huge role in Mistover in that they are bursting off your screen with personality. A Grim Reaper character carries around a massive scythe bleeding with dark energy, while the Shadow Blade wields a lightning fast chain with a razor sharp spear tip on each end.
What Mistover provides is a surprisingly complex dungeon crawling game with extremely high stakes. We loved that this is a game that can be picked up and played for a mere twenty minutes, or hours. Its addicting approach to progression and stylish turn-based gameplay made it fun to come back to time and time again. While the story is forgettable and permadeath mechanics may be a bit too much for some, Mistover comes easy to recommend for fans of the genre.
Mistover launches on Steam, Playstation 4 and Nintendo Switch on October 10th.
Check out our Review Guide to see what we criteria we use to score games.
Mistover was provided to the reviewer by the publishing company but this fact did not alter the reviewer’s opinion*
