A new autobattler will release on August 10th as Tales & Tactics hits Steam Early Access, bringing a tabletop-inspired journey to a grandiose tournament of tactical skill to your computer. It's a combination of autobattle drafting game, like Auto Chess or Teamfight Tactics, with roguelike bonuses, items, and adventures ala Slay the Spire and its ilk.
It's a wild variety of bonuses and combos all stacked on top of each other to let you make crazy builds that break the game—and the developers are hoping that its staged "complexity at your own pace" will ease you into it and only add that complexity as you want it.
Tales & Tactics is developed by Table 9 Studio, makers of one of our favorite Slay the Spire mods—Downfall, the one that casts you as a villain. It was good enough to get one of those fancy standalone, non-workshop Steam pages reserved for the best mods.
The basics of Tales & Tactics have you drafting characters from a unit pool of archetypes and jobs—skeletons, demons, orcs, faeries, marksmen, scrappers, tanks, mages. Merging three of a kind lets you upgrade them to a new level, and equipping them with permanent gear lets you tweak how they behave in combat. While doing all that you're able to then double-down on combos by grabbing character buffs, ala Slay the Spire's items, that affect every unit you take. None of that's to mention that you apparently can upgrade your character to have more powers.
There's a demo you can play right now, actually. PC Gamer's Harvey Randall gave it a shot back when they'd first posted it and found it was quite complex, but was still promising. (Or extra promising if you like complexity.)
"I genuinely think Tales & Tactics is worth your time if you're into auto-battlers or roguelikes, and especially if you're into both. It mashes two different genres together in a novel way, and it's filled with charming artwork and little beasties to enjoy," he said, "My issues with the game's dizzying amount of systems could be a draw for the min-maxing geniuses of the gaming world."
You can find Tales & Tactics on Steam, where it'll launch on August 10th, 2023. It's developed by Table 9 Studio and published by Yogscast Games.
