Lead a Post-Apocalyptic Cult in Nowhere Prophet – Preview
“‘Cause we got a little convoy, rockin’ through the night.”
There’s this really cool thing that good post-apocalyptic fiction does, where it takes the mundane and makes it feel mysterious. From the very beginning of its beta, which ran until Wednesday the 22nd May, Nowhere Prophet does just that.
I’m a wanderer in a desert wasteland, a world with only pockets of society and the stragglers dotted between them. I come across a Fallen Star, surrounded by smatterings of people who have given it a God-like status. In reality, it appears to be a crashed satellite, housing an AI of some kind. But I don’t know what satellites are and neither do the others there, so when the Fallen Star speaks to me, telling me to lead the people to “The Crypt,” they revere me as a prophet.
Nowhere Prophet can be described using many terms: rogue-like, deck-builder, role-playing game. It’s an interesting mixture of all three, with some turn-based tactical combat thrown in to boot. You have two primary resources, Food and Hope, and each turn you use some of each of these resources to move to one of a web of locations dotted out on a map leading to the aforementioned Crypt. These locations might contain enemies primed for attack, small settlements with interesting stories to tell, or resources that you can gather in order to maintain the stability of your convoy.
That convoy is made up of followers. You have a deck of cards to represent each of them, with their own special abilities, attack ratings, and defence ratings. Each follower can take up to two wounds. If they’re killed in a fight, they take one and gain a ‘wounded’ status effect. After that, their card is destroyed for good. It really hammers home my position as a prophetic leader, holding those that put all their faith in me like a deck of cards in a game. Are these people really meaningful to me beyond their utility on the battlefield?
The first point of interest our convoy comes across is a scene of two bandit clans divvying up loot, among which includes slaves. I have to make a decision: fight the bandits, save the slaves, or walk away. I choose to try and free the slaves, and midway through the bandits are alerted, so we enter combat.
When a fight begins in Nowhere Prophet there are two decks of cards at your disposal: the Convoy deck and the Leader deck. The Convoy deck consists of cards that represent your followers. Your Leader deck consists of one-off buffs, attacks, and abilities that you can use to try and shape the battle. You place your Convoy cards on the field, consisting of a grid of circles, and take turns to place followers, dish out attacks, and apply buffs.
There’s a queue system, wherein followers you place further to the front row are able to attack, but those directly behind them in the column can’t, but are also protected from standard attacks as a result of this positioning. If you have a follower with high defence and attack ratings, it makes sense to place them at the front of the queue to take the brunt of your enemy’s attacks and deal plenty of damage, whereas if you have a follower that buffs others on the field, you’ll want to keep them protected behind their tougher comrades.
Like other card games, some Convoy cards have built-in modifiers: one bandit foe I encounter has the ‘taunt’ ability, which means my followers can’t attack any other opponents until they are killed. I counter this with one of my Guerrilla Fighters, which when placed, immediately deals damage to any opponents with the taunt ability. I have few options and in a few ways I’m outnumbered, but fittingly, this turns the fight in my favour. Some of my followers are defeated and take wounds as a result, but I win the battle mostly unscathed.
There’s a refuge point nearby where I can set up camp and tend to mine and my followers’ wounds, but between it and the convoy are a few more locations. We run into a band of worshippers using psychics locked up in cages for spiritual purposes that we run through without issue, and we also find a patch of land where we’re able to hunt for more food. When we take refuge, I’m able to share luxury items with my followers to gain more of the Hope resource. I can also choose to patch up the wounds suffered by myself or by my followers; being the benevolent prophet that I am, I choose to assist my followers. Risky, given that I’ve taken damage and won’t get another opportunity to heal up for a little while, but I’d feel selfish otherwise.
That’s another interesting thing about Nowhere Prophet that I’m eager to explore further once the game is out of beta. I am a prophet to the people that follow me, but how well-placed is their faith? The game is a rogue-like after all; the expectation that I will die over and over and keep trying, again and again, is there. What does it say about the futility of faith? Of cult mentality? There isn’t really any dialogue between myself and my followers that address these questions, but the nature of the game’s genre, coupled with how disposable followers feel when they’re represented by a fragile deck of cards ensures that Nowhere Prophet definitely alludes to a larger conversation about that dynamic.
These are the questions that linger on the game’s fully fledged release, but what I am able to say for certain is that Nowhere Prophet is unforgiving unless you think long and hard about your tactical decisions. Quite quickly after departing from our refuge, we run into a gang of bandits who demand batteries from us which we do not have. And so, we enter combat – their moves are brutal, and before long, I fall. My followers, for a short while, go on without me, but soon many part ways with the convoy and some even die, until my convoy is no more.
The only thing left to do is embody a new prophet and start the cycle all over again, to begin the desperate pilgrimage once more, constantly grasping for that promised land of the Crypt.
Nowhere Prophet is due for release in the Summer of 2019 from Sharkbomb Studios.