As a game focused wholly on its story, Siege Survival: Gloria Victis is very invested in its character development and accuracy in its time and theme. Blackeye Games and FishTankStudio have successfully ventured out and created a game that is very entertaining with its strategical and over-thinking genre allowing you to immerse yourself in its story and carry out your immersion through realistic thinking in its gameplay.

There’s so much to adore about the set up to the game, you’re thrown into dialogue-heavy and highly detailed cinematography for a game that’s based around an overview strategy game, with so much detailed art to go along with the multiple-choice storyline, that doesn’t seem to change much about the game overall, but gives you different information on different routes in its initial introduction.

You’re under siege from an invading group named the Ismirs; the savage warriors of Kargald have invaded your home. Having to defend your home in the spur of the moment, you have to make a choice. Save your fleeing citizens or the workers and salvaging supplies. You can change the orientation of your story from these choices, and after the original introduction, you’re shown what you have to work within your main game.

You have two cycles in which you play; Day and night. During the day you prepare, build, care for your animals and otherwise. You are required to craft, tend to the animals, clean up after the battles, prepare and send supplies to your bastion to help hold out the war for your NPCs. During the night, you scavenge for materials. Of course, it’s not just as simple as that. There are patrols carried out by the invaders whom you can fight or sneak around, all while avoiding or removing obstacles that stop you from moving to separate areas. There’s nothing really new to its controls compared to other titles. You just seem to click and wait for your characters to follow through with their actions. After that, it’s a waiting game, and even while scavenging, it’s a very simple concept.

This game has had a lot of effort put into the small details, making it satisfying to watch the original opening cinematography on top of the beautiful art with all dialogue and lore explanation. However, the actual gameplay and map are very basic and not overly detailed compared to other sections of the game.

There are a lot of different things to take note of in this game. Maintaining consistency and repeating the more successful cycles over and over is the easiest way to succeed in completing the game. You really have to pay full attention to all the minuscule mechanics in this game, otherwise, you might accidentally miss an important detail that will end your game instantly, just like I did when I repeatedly let my population starve.

Written by: Caitlin