Farabel

Farabel is a turn-based strategy game set in a fantasy world where time travel is possible. The game's main quirk is that it's played backwards, on a scenario-by-scenario basis. You begin at the end of a long conflict between the player's human kingdom and the orcs, who are trying to destroy them. Every completed scenario sends you back a battle, where you reverse-level up Cendor, the king, reducing his attacks, retaliation attacks, hit points, and regeneration. With every new scenario he gets weaker, although he may gain or regain a few abilities as the game progresses. Cendor's own contribution to the time travel theme is that three times per scenario he can reverse time on a single unit, placing them where they were in the previous round, allowing them to attack and move again, healing damage they just incurred and removing other effects.

There are 13 scenarios that are part of the main campaign, and each scenario has a bonus goal related to either how quickly you complete the level or how few casualties your side suffers. Meet or exceed the goal and you're rewarded with a bonus scenario, a side story absent of plot that allows you the chance to kill more orcs without the benefit of Cendor or his high priest healer (the other main character, whose abilities also degrade). Their bickering and travelling through time is the central thread that ties the scenarios together, culminating in a battle at the origin of the conflict.

The time manipulation idea is a grand one, with the difficulty increasing as access to more capable units and abilities drifts away, and reversing a unit adds a layer of strategy whether using it on enemies or friends. As the game continues, the player will have learned the basic tactics necessary to keep more characters alive and more efficiently take out enemies, although often the more esoteric abilities won't stay around long for you to enjoy using them too much. Enemy units change too, sometimes becoming weaker over time, but also introducing new threats and a few boss characters that wind up being the target to finish the scenario.

It's unfortunate that sometimes the goals aren't so clear, however. One mission has you breaking a bridge to cut the enemy off, but it's not explicitly stated which part of the bridge will disappear. As a result of this we reached the end of the scenario with characters in the wrong place and, at the very end of the scenario, we were forced to restart. There are also situations where you meet a challenge for the first time and, without any foreknowledge, must bumble your way through it, trying different experiments to see if you understand what the game is trying to tell you. There are some surprises, especially on later levels, which may mean you lose the scenario despite having reasonable control over what you see.

Bugs lurk in the game, too, despite some post-launch patches dealing with a few of them. We were unable to select a unit at one point after it had been awakened by a melee attack that broke its sleep effect, though other similar incidents didn't duplicate the effect. There are also other minor annoyances as well. The unit-select button, for instance, doesn't discriminate between units that have moved and units that haven't, and summoning a unit into an unseen hex makes it inaccessible until another unit moves to see it. Also, using alt-tab to select a different window for the PC version will invariably crash the game, and you cannot save mid-game.

The biggest problem winds up being that there's not enough of a follow-through with gameplay. Despite there being 13 base scenarios, the game still feels like it's rushing through, leaving game mechanisms behind before you really get to know them too well. The bonus scenarios could have taken a back seat to adding more campaign levels to flesh it out. The core gameplay is decent, but the decisions are narrow enough that they often feel a bit more like solving a freeform puzzle than something that is tactically deep. The enemy AI winds up adding the random element, forcing you to keep good avenues of retreat, and to mark range for your archers and cavalry relative to enemy movement stats. The units you're given for each scenario have a decent variety, some with special abilities that can help give the player an edge, and the enemy has a plethora of different types, some with catastrophic abilities that will dash any hope of success, and when you're not ready for it or don't anticipate how your use of an ability will mesh with what the designers were thinking, you'll have to prepare for disappointment.

But when a plan comes together it can be fun, using all the small attacks of your piddly units in concert, dancing characters out of the way to bring new ones in for more hits, using time reversal to let one hit again, using charge attacks to add damage and take out a creature before the enemy gets to wipe you out, then healing a cluster of your units before the turn is over. The music is decent enough, being a more dramatic contrast to the game's attempt at a lighter tone, and while many aspects of the game feel a bit brief, at least it provides a good variety of scenarios in the campaign, with little repetition. But at some point one needs the space to test new ideas if the strategy is going to feel meaty, and Farabel does not give you enough.