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Urtuk has been a continuously evolving, but so far endlessly interesting discovery for me. This is an introduction to my encounter with this game so far. I am anticipating future updates that will show up in the feed later.
This game really hit the spot when I found out about it. One prerequisite for me is the game running on OpenBSD... "OpenBSD?!?!!??"
Well, I'm glad you asked. Means you probably don't know me yet as the person notoriously experimenting with and cataloguing commercial games running on OpenBSD. That's almost exclusively indie games that use an opensource framework, based on some form of interpreted intermediate code. I started with FNA games/fnaify and later also included libGDX games. Slay the Spire was the first libGDX game running on OpenBSD, but now Urtuk is another very interesting one.
The other reason of my love affair with this game is that is an excellent turn-based strategy game, and I have been partial to turn-based tactical goodness for a long time.
Early on in my gaming life, I enjoyed RPG games with tactical combat, like "Das Schwarze Auge," aka the "Realms of Arkania" series in the mid-90's. The Battle Isle series was another obsession of mine in the mid-90's. Something about those games was very intriguing compared to the then more popular real-time strategy games like Warcraft or Command & Conquer. Incubation was an extremely fascinating later 90's title, though I think I only played the demo then and nowadays it is a giant hassle to run... or at least it doesn't really run outside of Windows to my knowledge.
X-Com: UFO Defense aka UFO: Enemy Unknown is another excellent title. I didn't play it until circa 2017, but then running it on OpenBSD with openxcom was a delight and one of the experiences that made me a believer in great gaming experiences on the OpenBSD operating system.
As of February 2022, the game is NOT RUNNABLE yet without you doing major development/compilation work yourself. The major components missing in OpenBSD packages at this point are:
I have a port for the former, but not yet ready to import as it needs a bit more polish. There is already a libGDX port, currently version 1.9.11. I think we will probably need a multiversion approach to libgdx in ports as there are major incompatibilities between individual version numbers. Not every game runs into every compatibility issue. Slay the Spire for example seems perfectly happy with libgdx 1.9.11, even though it bundles 1.9.5. But Urtuk doesn't work with 1.9.11. I currently have a separate build for libgdx 1.9.9 that I'm using, but getting that into a multiversion port is still a work in progress... What certainly doesn't help is the Maven dependency management that pulls in about 80M of dependencies for every version of libGDX. Previous testing from my side has shown that I can manually trim it down to about 10-15M, but that is a lot of tedious work...
I've outlined the pains to get the game running on OpenBSD, but once it runs it is absolutely worth it. On first sight, the art style in the main menu may seem a little odd and overly visceral. The main character is shown with boils/rashes all over. The Guardian class isn't shown as a noble knight, but rather is hunched over and seems barely strong enough to lift his sword when he strikes.
After looking at some basic settings like window size, fullscreen, volume, you get a (negligeable) background story about Urtuk being experimented on in a prison and then freed by a friend. This is followed by a tutorial level that lets you try out some basics with a tutorial window showing up on the left.
I forgot to mention that before all of this, you get to pick your party composition, up to 3 initial "mutators" (items giving you perks), and the difficulty level.
The main game starts right after the tutorial. You start with a party of 3, travelling through "nodes" on a map that contains information about what you will encounter. Such events may include freeing a prisoner, defeating a "legendary" leader of an enemy faction, laying siege to a fortress or stronghold, defending a castle or stronghold, escaping an endless wave of enemies while trying to save an NPC.
One of my highlights have been the huge battles when a town defends itself against invaders. You often have allied, NPC factions involved. In the town defense battles, there are huge numbers of attackers and defenders, and you help your side to win while trying to keep your party members alive.
I have only played the first and second map of the game so far, but the variety of battles and encounter types is already great thanks to well-made procedural generation of the battle and world maps. Your party grows over time as more heroes join you, but no matter how many you have in your ranks, only 6 characters can participate in the battle at a time.
Your heroes level up with experience. The other major way to change the odds in your favor is to equip them with "mutators" that provide perks. One example would be Monster Heart that adds an additional 25% HP. Another useful early-game mutator is Ranged Support. This gives your ranged units a free shot when a melee unit attacks an enemy in range.
There is a stamina system that limits how many such actions or attacks your unit can perform; and you can increase your stamina with level ups or mutators.
The tactical battles are surprisingly deep, especially once you dare trying the higher difficulty levels that really test your knowledge on how to get the most out of your units and decisions. Ranged enemy units are always dangerous, but some character classes can give you an advantage at dealing with them. The footman for example can quickly close the gap to an enemy unit with his "Ram" attack that can cross 2 additional hexagons and pushes the enemy 1 hexagon. The Footman also has an innate perk called "Engaging Strike". With this, as long as he has stamina, an "engaged" enemy can't just walk away, but will be hit and pulled back to its prior hexagon.
Other tactical bits of interest are related to the environment. The game may have taken some inspiration from the likes of "Into the Breach" here. Some units (yours or enemy units) can push, pull, or even "flip" enemy units over their head. If you use this to move an enemy into a wall, a barricade, a trap (yes, those exist, too, and some units can place them), or a death pit, this can injur, stun, or insta-kill enemies, netting you a critical advantage in battle.
If your characters fall in battle, they are first only "injured". In order to get back to health, they need "medicine" which is pretty rare. If you don't heal them, they either die after a longer time on their own - a warning prepares you for this ahead of time - or die if they fall in battle again. This is a bit reminding of what Darkest Dungeon did, where heroes can recover or be replaced, allowing for a game that sometimes crushes your party mercilessly in a battle or dungeon run, but allows you to still continue and try to recover from this, rather than having to reload a previous savegame.
Speaking of which, you can choose to run the game in "Ironman" mode, meaning no manual saves; only automatic. Frankly, I have only played in "Ironman" mode. To me, a major appeal in a game like this is to run into seemingly impossible encounters and testing if you are able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Loading previous savegames to replay a battle seems to go against the whole idea... That's why I'm sticking with Ironman.
The tactical combat is very engaging. While the difficulty of encounters tends to vary ("hard" isn't always hard, and "easy" encounters can be harder than expected), there is nothing quite like battles that look impossible to win on the outset, but you come up with a desperate strategy that in the end leads to victory.
There was a battle with seemingly endless waves of enemies and my heroes had to make it to the other side of the map (in the second zone). Enemies kept spawning behind me, but there were others ahead of me, slowing my characters down. In the end, only 1 or 2 of my party of 6 made it out alive... but then they got rewarded with a special perk ("Soldier", I believe) that increases some core stats significantly, and that is only awarded if the character was about the only one left standing after a very difficult battle. This made it all the more worth it to try to face impossible odds.
This is an awesome game, and after over 10-20 hours of playing it, I feel like I've only scratched the surface. There are more zones after the second map that I haven't discovered yet. "Races" or types like Vampires, Beasts can be unlocked for your starting trio and add a very different play style with different trade-offs.
I found another long-form discussion of the game on gemini-verse here, but haven't read the whole thing yet:
gemini://gemini.mcgillij.dev/urtuk-the-desolation.gmi
Kudos to Omar Polo (op@) for the gemini OpenBSD package browser GemPKG that I am using for many of the linked ports in this article.