TurnBasedFest has just got going and we’re honoured that Relic Space is being featured among the fantastic selection of other tactical gems!
As our contribution to this celebration of turn-based goodness, we're releasing another major Demo update. This update reflects the hard work that has gone towards adding polish to the game in recent months, as we gear up for a Q1 2023 launch into Early Access.
Here are some of the key new features in the update:
New challenging game modes
This update gives a first taste of the new game modes that will be important to generating replayability in the Early Access release. A new difficulty level, called 'Extinction', will provide an extra level of challenge for veteran players who are finding 'Tactical' difficulty too straighforward.
And there's now a full-on 'Ironman' mode where, as usual, you are limited to only one save slot, which is automatically updated as you progress and is deleted if you die. Death is permanent.
Improvements to manual mode
A lot of streamers have been picking up Relic Space over the last few months, and watching those streams has made clear that a number of people are attracted to playing the game using the 'manual' as opposed to 'automatic' weapons mode. That's completely understandable, as tactical players often love to drill down into the details of game mechanics by making every small choice themselves. But before this update, the user interface had been a lot more geared towards automatic mode.
No more! This update brings a big overhaul to manual mode, making it fully playable for the first time by removing some unnecessary delays and required keypresses, as well as by introducing a new weapon-range indicator (see the red hexes in the gif below) that simultaneously serves to make clear when your weapons have yet to be fired in manual mode.
Lore
The lore for Relic Space has been planned out in some detail, though to date has been mostly limited to some dialogs in the scripted tutorial missions. This update for the first time brings lore dialogs to random NPCs. Although these are still quite small in number and limited in scope, they offer a taste of the rich and suprising sci-fi narrative still to come.
Change log
Full details of the changes can be viewed on the (see Demo 211) website.
Join the community
To discuss the game with fellow fans - and the developer - and get free early access to bleeding-edge builds, join the Discord. Alternatively sign-up to the low-volume newsletter to be notified of key updates and new releases.