Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
Genre: Tactical Strategy, Tactical RPG, Turn-Based, Stealth, Post-Apocalyptic

The Bearded Ladies‘ Mutant Year Zero Road To Eden was one of 2018’s best and most underrated games, successfully combining the tactical turn-based strategy from the XCOM franchise with stealth elements. This resulted in a more active and involved gameplay mechanics compared to the traditional XCOM-like genre of games, and the Swedish developer continued that with 2020’s Corruption 2029.

Now, their latest and perhaps most ambitious effort yet has arrived in the form of Miasma Chronicles. But does it fall under its own weight, hampering the final results?

Post-Apocalypse

If you’re familiar with the turn-based mechanics made famous by the XCOM franchise or if you’ve ever played Mutant Year Zero Road To Eden, Miasma Chronicles pretty much plays like those games. In fact, the developer actually brought a lot of their previous mechanics from Mutant Year Zero Road To Eden into Miasma Chronicles. While Miasma Chronicles looks mostly like an XCOM game, the stealth elements are heavier than you’d expect, especially if you’re coming from XCOM or other conventional XCOM-like games. In Miasma Chronicles, you control your team of party members in real time both while exploring the world and during combat.

How does that work? Well, you’ll encounter groups of enemies scattered throughout the levels in Miasma Chronicles. You’ll move in real time and use the game’s stealth mechanics to ambush enemies one by one. While the stealth mechanics may seem optional, they’re actually not. On a difficulty higher than Standard (normal), using stealth ambushes is essential if you want to defeat enemies. That’s because Miasma Chronicles is difficult even by XCOM standards. Plus, the stealth options are still quite limited. You can only do stealth ambushes with specific “Silent” weapons and these are super rare.

I only managed to find two (TWO!) of these in the entire game. Too many of them might have broken the game and made things too easy, but with the enemies in the mid-to-late-game requiring so much damage to kill, more options for stealth kills would have been great. There were many situations when I had no choice but to forget about going stealth and had to go full guns blazing, which was frustrating.

Miasma Chronicles isn’t actually as punishing or unforgiving as XCOM in terms of difficulty but the difficulty can feel extremely unbalanced. Despite being an XCOM veteran with years of experience, Miasma Chronicles forced me to lower the difficulty to Narrative (easy) when I encounter the game’s weird and random difficulty spikes. The developers did put an effort into making the game more accessible by allowing unexperienced players the option of Partial Tactical (less RNG) or Full Tactical (full RNG), but playing the game even on Standard at Full Tactical can still be a frustrating experience due to the random difficulty spikes and other smaller details.

For instance, in Standard, your party members don’t recover their health after battle even though the game’s in-game currency and health supplies are scarce. Meanwhile, in Narrative, your party members all get automatically nursed back to health after every battle. In most XCOM-like tactical turn-based games, there comes a point in the story when you’ll finally feel a bit overpowered or at least not overwhelmed.

Unfortunately, in the 25 hours or so that it took me to finish Miasma Chronicles, I never achieved that same feeling and that feeling of being underpowered and overwhelmed never went away for the entirety of the game. Another aspect of the game that contributes to that feeling is how often forces players into enemy ambushes as part of the game’s story quests. Sometimes you go to an area and just get into a fight you’re unprepared for.

Thankfully, it seems like the developers knew this so they did make it so that every time players get into story ambushes, the game automatically makes a checkpoint save set just before the encounter. I’m sure that the unbalanced difficulty can always be fixed and tweaked post-launch, but as of right now, the game could use a bit more work in that regard, especially since I never had the same difficulty problems with their previous game, Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden.

While I appreciate that Miasma Chronicles features several accessibility and quality-of-life improvements (such as being able to manually save at any time), it’s strange that the game suffers from some issues that are a bit more obvious. For example, the game features many levels and hubs you can explore, but there is no mini-map or any kind of map to help you navigate them. Sure, their designs are not that confusing but it would have made the game more enjoyable if it featured mini-maps or maps.

Another big problem with Miasma Chronicles is its side quest puzzles. The majority of these puzzles involve exploring, finding a note and figuring out the PIN number to a keypad. The solutions are usually vague and confusing to the point that I have no idea how you’re supposed to find the answer considering how the game’s camera angles work (it’s sort of a far-away top-down perspective). You can’t zoom in and the answers to these keypad puzzles seemingly involved looking for these precise details. How would the player find them if they can’t even zoom in closer?

All that being said, there’s also a lot that The Bearded Ladies did right in Miasma Chronicles. This is their biggest and most ambitious game yet in terms of sheer scale. It shares a lot of mechanics with their previous game, Mutant Year Zero Road To Eden, but this time the developers had the ability to go all out with an original IP. Mutant Year Zero Road To Eden was based on an existing tabletop franchise. It’s clear that the developers have put the utmost effort into this game. It’s not just the graphics, but also the writing and worldbuilding that has improved. The narrative plot and characters seem to be inspired a lot by Dune, Star Wars (very much so, but I can’t go into spoilers without spoiling the game) and other sci-fi stories. It all feels like a potentially great original IP in the making, so kudos to the developers for creating something that’s original in the current games industry that’s full of remakes and games based on existing IP.

May The Miasma Be With You

What I like the most about Miasma Chronicles is one quality-of-life feature that I sincerely believe all games should have, especially ones with RPG elements like this. In Miasma Chronicles, you can re-spec the skill tree of your characters for free at any time without any penalty or in-game charges. Most games, and that’s if they allow you to re-spec in the first place, often incur penalties or charges for players to re-spec. There’s really no reason why other games won’t let you do this, especially since it only makes the game more fun, as well as gives players much more room and creativity to play around with their characters to the fullest without worrying about whether they’re wasting their precious skill point for an upgrade that they won’t even use.

Last but not least, the developers clearly learnt a lot since Mutant Year Zero Road To Eden. That game was a bit too short and the abrupt ending felt rushed and inconclusive. Miasma Chronicle is a much longer game (around 25 to 30 hours or potentially more if you take your time with the side quests and exploration) and the ending is much more satisfying, albeit still being open-ended and teasing future sequels or DLC expansions.

Miasma Chronicles is The Bearded Ladies’ third XCOM-like game set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland and it’s arguably their best one yet. It has lots of flaws, but many of those can be fixed with future patches. The developer continued to improve their mastery with the niche gameplay combo of tactical turn-based strategy mixed with stealth, and this game is an example of that. It’s still worth playing in spite of being hampered by the weight of its ambition.

PROS

• Their most cinematic and ambitious game yet.
• A good blend of XCOM and stealth mechanics.
• Quality of life features such as saving anywhere and being able to re-spec characters’ skills at any time.

CONS

• Unbalanced difficulty and difficulty spikes.
• No mini-map or maps.
• Confusing and vague keypad puzzles.

FINAL SCORE: 60/100

Miasma Chronicles was reviewed on PC based on a review copy provided by the publisher. It is slated to release for the PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC on 23 May 2023.