About 50 years into Double Fine’s Massive Chalice, a centuries-spanning game of fantasy-themed turn-based tactics, I realized that I was going to need to learn to let go.
That’s because of its clever take on the concept of “permadeath”; a game mechanic that makes most characters – even heroes – mortal. When they die they’re gone forever.
It’s far from the first game to implement the idea, but most others – especially in the turn-based strategy camp – make it possible (and even sometimes easy) to shepherd your favourite characters through the game from start to finish, either by reloading saves when they die or by keeping them out of the most dangerous situations.
Massive Chalice offers similar freedoms, but they make little difference in terms of keeping your battlers alive. That’s because they’re human and have a human lifespan. No matter how protective you are of your favourite warriors, they will eventually die of natural causes, anywhere from the age of around 40 to – if they’re really lucky – somewhere up in their mid-80s.
It’s a wonderfully sly way to move players away from the practice of saving every few minutes and reloading whenever things take a turn for the worse. It still sucks when powerful warriors die on the battlefield, but hey, they were going to go anyway. Better a quick, honourable death than one of sickness in bed, no?
Plus, your best warriors can bequeath powerful personal relics to their surviving family members, which means some of their power lives on after they die. Nothing like a little tangible legacy to brighten the mood at a vigil.
Double Fine Productions
Of course, this novel system also has its downsides.
Unlike other games in which permadeath plays a role – like, say, Intelligent System’s terrific Fire Emblem series – the heroes in Massive Chalice haven’t really any personality. They just aren’t around long enough. That makes caring for or taking an interest in them for any reason other than their battle prowess pretty unlikely.
Rather than hone in on individual heroes, Double Fine places the narrative focus on a nameless, faceless immortal commander inhabited by the player. The story – a pretty standard bit of fantasy fare about an encroaching evil called the Cadence that nips at the borders of a small continent – sees this commander summoned by the game’s titular enormous goblet. The chalice is set in the realm’s primary palace and is the place from which two voices, male and female, emanate to provide explanations, guidance, and the occasional joke. They serve as your only constant companions throughout the game.
Perhaps sensing a lack of satisfying exposition and character development, the writers have tossed in the occasional choose-your-own-adventure style twist wherein one of your heroes approaches with an issue that requires executive action. One might be interested in joining a 12-year-long tournament that would remove him or her from your retinue and could possibly result in death. Another might present you with a device he or she’s invented, the purpose of which is unknown. You must decide whether to destroy it, turn it on, or toss it into the magical chalice and see what happens (I strongly recommend that last option, by the way).
These quick little episodes make for engaging distractions and help make heroes into something more than names and ages. I wish there were more of them.
Double Fine Productions
Between battles – which happen every decade or so – a metered timeline scrolls across the screen marking off various events, including the deaths of old characters, births of new ones, and the completion of years-long armour and weapon research efforts and ambitious construction projects.
Indeed, a key part of the experience is managing all of these non-combat activities – especially your kingdom’s various families.
If you build a keep on a new parcel of land you need to withdraw one of your warriors from active duty and make him or her the regent, then choose another to marry him or her so they can produce babies.
It’s a surprisingly complex undertaking that involves analyzing not only the potential mates’ ages and fertility (you can, by the way, install same-sex couples as region rulers, though they won’t produce any offspring), but also the personal traits they might pass on and their battle disciplines and how they combine. This determines the sorts of warriors the keep will produce.
Fail to pay adequate attention to these details and you may find within a few short decades that you aren’t producing enough heroes to fill all available posts (other buildings besides keeps, such as the research-speeding Sagewright Guild, require heroes, too); that you haven’t enough warriors to take into battle when the Cadence attacks; or that all of your warriors are close-quarter fighters rather than a proper mix of ranged and melee combatants, which will make battles a lot harder.
Double Fine Productions
And that finally brings us to combat, the thing that, in most turn-based strategy games, makes or breaks the experience, but which plays a slightly less important role here given all the novel stuff Double Fine has us getting up to on the world screen.
And that’s good, because while Massive Chalice‘s combat is competent, it’s also kind of uneven.
Battles begin with an alarm alerting players that the Cadence is invading two or more borders. Players can pick which attack to repel based on the type of enemies spotted, the potential reward for victory, and how badly that particular bit of their empire needs protecting. Choose not to defend one area a few times in a row and it will be swallowed by evil.
Then you need to choose five heroes – assuming you have at least five available – and make sure they’re properly outfitted with the right armour and weapons for the job, plus spend earned skill points on special abilities, like an arrow shot that clears the fog of war. Once chosen they’ll all hop into the chalice and get zapped to the battlefront where the fighting begins.
The combat interface is a snap to learn: pick a hero, select a tile to move to, and choose to attack an enemy if you can. Each turn consists of two actions – movement and attack (or item use) – though you’ll lose the second action if you opt to travel beyond the orange zone defining your attack area.
All of this should prove pretty familiar for anyone who’s played these games before. It’s straightforward, rewards strategic planning, and is nicely executed.
Except when it’s not.
Double Fine Productions
Double Fine chose to procedurally generate battlefield maps, which makes for some puzzling layouts that can result in players randomly spawning near a huge horde of enemies or, conversely, make it a chore to find stragglers roaming around in the fog of war near the end of a match.
I actually encountered one map that seemed all but unwinnable. It was keep battle, in which the Cadence tries to kill off the local regent and destroy the castle and any trainees within. My cadre of seasoned, well-equipped heroes spawned on the opposite side of the map from the keep’s two masters, and no matter what I did (this was one of few battles I felt the need to keep restarting to see if I could figure out how to avoid disaster) I couldn’t get to them before multiple hordes of foes descended upon and murdered them.
This sort of unintentional misbalancing pops up in other places, too. For example, things start of kind of hard due to the immediate introduction of some admittedly cool and imaginative but surprisingly challenging enemies that do things like explode and damage all nearby characters.
Then, once you make it past the first few battles and into the middle part of the game where you can really begin building up your kingdom, things start to become weirdly easy for maybe 150 years or so. Some powerful enemies show up – including one that ages your characters with each hit (a wonderfully clever idea for an attack, given the game’s theme) – but you ought to be well equipped to handle them, as well as easily replace any lost heroes.
It’s not until the final act that things seem to become properly and fairly challenging. I’ll admit I played on Normal, and that harder difficulties could result in a better balanced experience, but I was nonetheless a little disappointed that combat didn’t remain consistently engaging from start to finish.
Double Fine Productions
The thing you can always count on with Double Fine is a game that defies expectations. Regardless of genre, the American indie studio’s designers always find ways to meaningfully shake things up in terms of both action and narrative, and this unusual generational take on turn-based strategy is no exception.
More than that, the developer is refreshingly and reliably egalitarian in all its work. Its library of games contains little in the way any sort of gender, race, or age bias – a true rarity within the medium. And Massive Chalice – with its dual-gendered cup, regents of all ages and both sexes, and heroes with a variety of skin tones – is perhaps the studio’s best example of diversity and representation yet. It’s welcomes all players.
All of this should be more than enough reason for strategy fans to give Massive Chalice a go. I’ve had a fine time with it.
But I can’t help but think of the game it could have been with just a little more sanding applied to its rougher edges.
