Baladins, the new game developed by Seed By Seed and being published by Armor Games is out now. And if you’re an enjoyer of games where its main gameplay loop is hinged on time loops, you should really, really check this little indie gem out.
In Baladins, you play as the namesake Baladin where you are a hero of peace, going around the lands spreading joy and helping out folks in a non-combative manner. The game has no combat system, but is pretty much a choice driven RPGs with skill checks, presented in a 3D diorama board with flat, paper-cut-out-ish characters.
But its real hook is that it all takes place in a time loop. You have six weeks, where one week of gameplay is a turn, to do what you can to complete quests and gather items to feed a glutton of a dragon willing to eat time itself, sending you back six weeks back every time until you figure out how to deal with the dragon.
What’s remarkable about Baladins’ usage of the time loop is how many different solutions a particular quest can resolve, and can be resolved. Here’s one example: there’s an old guard tower haunted with ghosts.
The first time I interacted there, I have no options but to give an item (which I have none that the ghosts wanted) or run away. Going around town and doing odd jobs I started to hear rumours that ghosts hate salt. And salt isn’t sold in the region, a region surround by sea and fishing boats are plenty, so supposedly I have to go to a whole other area to get salt and deal with the ghosts.
However, that’s not the only way to deal with the ghastly situation. Another solution I found was by luck from getting a random encounter. A little dude asks if I can open a jar which he thinks his friend is in. A successful skill check later, we ended up freeing a ghost and that was not the little dude’s friend. But now I have a jar where ghosts can be kept in. And yes, it can be given to the ghosts at the tower and they got trapped in the jar, solving the ghost situation.
Baladins has a handy quest log that keep tracks of all the quests you’ve encountered across multiple loops, alongside hints you’ve gotten from rumours and more importantly, the many ways the quests can resolve. Like a visual novel, there can be different routes and different endings. And those are independent of each other. The two ways I’ve described to handle the ghosts still ends up with the ghosts perishing, which is deemed a bad ending (the game makes it clearer why some endings are considered as such). So the other ending, which I presume is the good ending, still eludes me 15 loops in.
And there’s more than two ways to get this bad ending. So depending on how you approach the game, your first encounter with this quest and how you handle it will be different from other players, and that’s fascinating.
But even if there are many different methods to get the bad ending of a quest, doesn’t mean it becomes meaningless once you get a repeat of the same outcome. Rather, these specific routes you take may be what you want to do to solve another quest. Getting a spirit doctor to deal with the ghost versus sealing them into a jar will net you different items by the end of the quest, which can be given to other folks to create items used for another quest.
As such, Baladins has a way to keep things fresh as you keep on repeating the same six weeks. The game also gates some solutions and routes until you hear specific rumours or have gotten a random encounter. I was ready to be bored and lost by the fifth loop as I couldn’t figure out how to complete some of these quests, but there are story hooks that’ll keep you get you looping for more.
If you get a kick of investigating different routes in a visual novel, Baladins’ bite-sized time loop gameplay loops is something you must try. It also helps that the writing is pretty decent. It calls you out for doing unquestionably bad, and the world isn’t shy with saying that it adopts socialist values which is fascinating.
Baladins is out now on PC (Steam). The game can be played with up to four players online, but despite the presentation showing how multiplayer and co-op seems to be integral to the experience, you can definitely play Baladins solo.