I do not want to control five zombies and three skeletons and my party and also maybe a dog, is usually what stops me rolling necromancers in RPGs. Zombies: quite slow, famously, but in CRPG The Necromancer’s Tale the undead are your party. Seems no-one wants to travel with a guy whose shoes smell like embalming fluid these days. Fine. I’ll make my own mates. Out of bodies.
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The twist here is that you’ll be trying to keep your midnight proclivities a secret from the townfolk, brushing the proverbial Chocolate Hobnob crumbs of forbidden arcane arts out of your beard and burning the packet before everyone else wakes up. There’s a sort of social stealth system, too, that sees you chocolate hobnobbing at high society parties, presumably trying to not open every conversation with “Hi I’m Terry and all my mates are animated cadavers”. There’s also an excellent fully illustrated spellbook.
CRPGs come in a few flavours usually. You’ve got your swordies and wordies and the occasional nicely balanced swordy-wordy. NecTales has hex-based combat where you cast spells, backed up by your gang of flaky shamblers and clattering calcium lads, but otherwise looks to be hanging about on the wordy side of the scale. “400,000 words of hand-written narrative and lore,” to be precise, alongside hand-drawn portraits for 180+ NPCs. “We have not used any generative AI in the game”, say developers Psychic Software. Good by me. If I wanted to engage with a pallid, grotesque simulacrum of something real, I’d raise another zombie.
The game is set near alternate history Venice on the cusp of the Enlightenment – a setting apparently rife for exacerbated tensions between science and superstition. This history is not so alternative, however, as to prevent Twickenhamese satirist Alexander Pope popping up in the corner, presumably to bang on about Homer to anyone in earshot.
The Necromancer’s Tale is out next month, July 17th. There’s a demo on Steam available now. Cheers to Turn Based Lovers for highlighting this.
