The free DLC Dwarves of Runenberg for The Last Spell will be released on April 24:

The Last Spell First DLC Dwarves of Runenberg to release on April 24th

New map, new race, new features + Free update.

Greetings Heroes!

Prepare your Haven, gather the dwarves and wait for the Night, as our first DLC Dwarves of Runenberg will release on April 24th!

Summary:
- New map: Runenberg
- New race: Dwarves
- New weapons
- New items: Stone Medals
- Free update

Thanks Couchpotato!

FUDO checked out the tactical RPG The Last Spell:

The Last Spell | RPG Review

RPGFan reviewed The Last Spell:

The Last Spell Review

Strategy RPGs and roguelikes. We don’t often see the combination together because they’re both inherently complex and rely on several systems to work. Roguelikes rely on procedural generation, permadeath, and generous randomization, while SRPGs rely on turn-based hex- or grid-based movement, robust customization, and carefully considered weighing of pros and cons by evaluating the landscape and enemies. To combine these two styles authentically would be a feat bordering on impossible. Surely, even attempting to scale this mountain would require extraordinary balance and mastering the art of game design.

[...]

As fun and impressive as The Last Spell is, I almost feel like it’s aged me. I am the type of person who goes in for long, heavy board games, loves to lose so that I can go again bolder and wiser, and relishes gnawing on two or more game-changing possibilities. Yet, I turned away from The Last Spell more than once because I couldn’t bear the idea of going through the stress again. In the right mood, The Last Spell is a gift and treasure. Still, you must not only be the kind of person who wants the densest strategy RPG experience ever created, but you also need to be in the mood to weigh twenty or so variables with each action, lest the house of cards you’ve constructed topple down.

Score: 83/100

Gamegrin checked out The Last Spell:

The Last Spell Review

The Last Spell is a roguelike isometric, turn-based, RPG tower defence developed by Ishtar Games and published by The Arcade Crew. My expectations of the storyline when I heard it was a dark fantasy was it would be generic. Like all dark fantasy stories, an endless war has ravaged the lands of a nameless world and it’s up to you to find peace. Only, The Last Spell’s writers have broken the generic tropes by absolutely rocking the kasbah with themes of total annihilation and the hope of destroying the things that led to said destruction in the game’s premise.

An unhinged archmage with the dumbest name I’ve heard — Heronymous Teller — decides the war has gone on for too long and learns how to cast a purple nuke blast. Picking a town that surprisingly had the entire royal family residing in, except for the king, it’s obliterated within seconds. The tragedy leads to The Cataclysm, a short period where mages from other regions — with orders from the king — learnt the spell to destroy literally every settlement in the land.

[...]

A roguelike tower defence game that doesn’t throw any punches in relation to its story, pixelated graphics and killer soundtrack. I’m sure you’ll have a blast on the pursuit to banish all magic with The Last Spell.

Score: 9.5/10

COG checked out the tactical RPG The Last Spell:

THE LAST SPELL REVIEW – A VERY METAL TRIUMPH

The Last Spell Review
It sort of snuck up on me around the 10 hour mark, but The Last Spell is a strong contender for strategy game of the year. On the surface, it seems pretty conventional. Maybe even derivative. But after you’ve made some progress and seen the larger shape of the game, you’ll find that nearly every system and mechanic is trying something different. Does that mean reinventing the wheel? Sometimes, sure it does. But what would we have if new games refused to take risks? The Last Spell is one of a kind, and I can’t stop playing it.

[...]

The Last Spell made me realize that a siege is the perfect video game scenario. It allows you to focus on a single area, and gives the player a chance to customize their base. It also lends itself to a small group of heroes standing bravely against a horde of faceless enemies. Combine that with other popular features such as roguelike development, and you have a pretty fun game. But spend some time with The Last Spell, and you will see how differently it plays.

Score: 90/100

MP1st reviewed the tactical RPG The Last Spell:

The Last Spell Review – The Last Tactical Stand

Welcoming players with hard-hitting main-menu metal music to make Eddie Munson proud, The Last Spell sets the grim mood and the head-banging rhythm even before you step into the battlefield. A tactical RPG with roguelite elements, this is a hard-as-nails tale about growing stronger, dying, and getting back into the fight knowing how to do better, along with some valuable perks that you earned during the battle. And it’s incredibly complex and addictive in all the right ways.

Dawn of the Undead
The tale says that the world is on the brink of destruction due to The Cataclysm, an enchantment summoned by mages in a final bid to end the rampaging war. It turned out for the worse, as fireballs lit the skies and wiped out nearly everything, spreading this poisoned purple mist that turns everyone into bloodthirsty undead creatures. Only a few Havens remain, but the hordes of the relentless tormented attack at night, trying to stop the mages from casting The Last Spell that will banish all magic from the land and hopefully restore peace. Who knows, maybe this time they won’t mess it up.

Your role in this medieval zombie apocalypse tale is to protect the last bastion of humanity and earn the mages enough time to conjure the spell. It won’t be easy, with the enemy numbers in the hundreds and your humble bastion of defense with just a few determined but inexperienced heroes.

[...]

There is nothing inherently wrong with the mechanics and fun factor of The Last Spell. The nearly two years in Early Access really served to hone and polish the game, making it a turn-based RPG fan’s dream. The ruthless challenge is deliberate, the long hours in some runs are part of the deal, and you’ll get your money’s worth for sure. Embrace the undead coming from the mist and enjoy one of the best tactical roguelite games of recent years, even if you must die over and over again.

Score: 9/10

I Dream of Indie Games checked out The Last Spell:

The Last Spell Review | Spellbinding

The tactical RPG The Last Spell will leave Early Access today:

The Last Spell 

The Last Spell is a tactical RPG with roguelite elements. During the days, you’ll have to carefully choose how you will re-build your city and how you’ll position your defenses. Will you prioritize buying a brand new flaming sword, or build a Mana Well to regenerate some priceless Mana after battles?

During night, you’ll have to exterminate all the monsters coming at your walls with a large range of weapons and powers. Level up your heroes, and repeat until the end.

Turn-Based Tactical RPG:

• The whole RPG package: primary stats, secondary stats, skills, perks, traits… and more.
• Build your own classes: upgrade your heroes with stat bonuses and perks. Want to make a canon glass rogue/mage fighting with a gun? Do it!
• Tons of procedurally generated trinkets, armors and weapons, each with their own skillset and playstyle!
• Manage your squad of heroes: they’re strong, but they are few and they have access to limited resources. Healing is rare, so try to find the good balance.

Hordes of Evil:

• Waves of hundreds of enemies to slay, burn, shock and slice! Don’t get overwhelmed.
• Dozens of enemy types with different behaviors, which will get stronger and stronger as you progress.
• Think and adapt: you have to deal with A LOT of enemies, so you want to optimize your damage output with strong AOE attacks. Enemies have various strength and weaknesses that will challenge your wits.

Protect the City:

• Rebuild the city to help you between fights. Get healed, get items, get new heroes. Spend your resources wisely!
• Build up your defenses: walls, traps, towers, catapults… every bit of help is welcomed.
• Protect the circle of magic at all costs! If you lose it, it’s game over.

Roguelite Elements:

• The game is meant to be hard. You will fail… but everytime you do, you’ll grow stronger.
• Procedurally generated Enemy waves, characters, weapons and a ton of unlockables will keep you entertained.
• A full range of difficulty levels to entertain the craziest hardcore players.

The tactical RPG The Last Spell will leave Early Access on March 9:

The Last Spell 1.0 Launch Date

See you next month.

Hello Heroes!

After more than a year and a half in Early Access, the time has finally come for The Last Spell to have an official launch date:

On March 9, The Last Spell will release in 1.0!

Thank you so much for your support and feedback during the Early Access. We hope you are as excited as we are about the launch date, with just two weeks left to wait!

The tactical RPG The Last Spell will be released early 2023:

The Last Spell 

The Last Spell is a tactical RPG with roguelite elements. During the days, you’ll have to carefully choose how you will re-build your city and how you’ll position your defenses. Will you prioritize buying a brand new flaming sword, or build a Mana Well to regenerate some priceless Mana after battles?

During night, you’ll have to exterminate all the monsters coming at your walls with a large range of weapons and powers. Level up your heroes, and repeat until the end.

Turn-Based Tactical RPG:

• The whole RPG package: primary stats, secondary stats, skills, perks, traits… and more.
• Build your own classes: upgrade your heroes with stat bonuses and perks. Want to make a canon glass rogue/mage fighting with a gun? Do it!
• Tons of procedurally generated trinkets, armors and weapons, each with their own skillset and playstyle!
• Manage your squad of heroes: they’re strong, but they are few and they have access to limited resources. Healing is rare, so try to find the good balance.

Hordes of Evil:

• Waves of hundreds of enemies to slay, burn, shock and slice! Don’t get overwhelmed.
• Dozens of enemy types with different behaviors, which will get stronger and stronger as you progress.
• Think and adapt: you have to deal with A LOT of enemies, so you want to optimize your damage output with strong AOE attacks. Enemies have various strength and weaknesses that will challenge your wits.

Protect the City:

• Rebuild the city to help you between fights. Get healed, get items, get new heroes. Spend your resources wisely!
• Build up your defenses: walls, traps, towers, catapults… every bit of help is welcomed.
• Protect the circle of magic at all costs! If you lose it, it’s game over.

Roguelite Elements:

• The game is meant to be hard. You will fail… but everytime you do, you’ll grow stronger.
• Procedurally generated Enemy waves, characters, weapons and a ton of unlockables will keep you entertained.
• A full range of difficulty levels to entertain the craziest hardcore players.

The tactical RPG The Last Spell will be released as Early Access version today:

Launch stream!

Watch the team play a few nights in The Last Spell (and hopefully they won't lose)

Hello everyone ! This week is crazy busy for us, but we’re very excited. Like, we’re counting the hours before the release! (less than 48 hours?!).

This Thursday June 3rd, to celebrate the release of The Last Spell in Early-Access, we’re going to host a very special stream session with some members of the team! During this special stream, we will try to survive a few nights and not die as the game will be released on Steam!

See you on Thursday June 3rd at 1.30PM UTC+2!

The turn-based RPG The Last Spell enters Early Access on June 3:

The Last Spell will be released on June 3rd!!

It feels so exciting and scary at the same time to release our new baby. The last game we released was Dead in Vinland, 3 years ago, so it's been a while! We're now (barely) a little older, and our team grew quite a bit, and we even changed our name! (For those who haven't noticed, our studio is now called Ishtar Games, and we even did a blogpost to explain it all)

Anyway, enough with the chitchat, here come the announcements! But first, here's our latest trailer, telling you everything you need to know about the game!

loading...

Early Access

The other big announcement is that The Last Spell will be an early access title. This means a lot of things, but maybe you wonder "why?":

As you'll see while playing the game, we got ambitious with The Last Spell. More than we anticipated at first x) We're super happy with how it's turning out to be, but we also know that player feedback will be crucial to make the game as good as we want it to be in the end. This is why, we've decided to take a new step in the development and make the game as an early-access title.

Our goal is to make the best roguelite tactical RPG, and to do that, players feedback will be extremely valuable to us. As we will receive them, we’ll be able to collaborate with the players on what they want to see in The Last Spell, and we will keep them in our minds as we move forward with the development cycle. This is a new step in the development of the game, but one that we're super excited to take with all of you :)

What will be in the early-access version on June 3rd?

All the core features of the game have been implemented and polished. The game is highly playable right now in a satisfactory form. And yes, the meta is finally here!

You can play the first part of the game, which consists of 12 consecutive ingame days + a boss fight. You should be able to reach the boss battle and maybe succeed after a few tentative runs. After that - without spoiling too much - you will be able to try new runs with difficulty modifiers, adding a lot of replayability.

tl;dr: All the core features are in the game. You can reach the first ending of the game, and there's a lot of replayability. You will most likely die. A lot

What does it mean for the players?

This means that the players can be involved in the next step of the development of The Last Spell. During the coming months, we will not only keep on adding new content to the game, but we'll also rework mechanics, do a lot of balancing changes, thanks to player feedback!

We plan on updating the game on a regular basis, and player will also have access to a beta branch, to see all the latest changes that we'll be working on at the studio.

Players will be able to offer their feedback on "Feature Upvote" (we'll give more details about that when the game is released) or even on our Discord server!

And yes, we're even ready for the 5 pages text documents that some of you will send us, with a million feedback.

Ready your swords, resplenish your Mana, prepare your scrolls of forbidden magic... There are only two weeks left to get ready for this fight.

One final info: the game will cost $19.99, with a 10% discount price for the first two weeks after launch.

The night has just begun...

See you very "soon", warriors!

The latest dev blog for The Last Spell looks at Hero Stats.

Hello survivors!

We’re back! It’s almost December, and we’re slowly getting closer to the release of The Last Spell!

Today we’ll take a closer look on how we designed the overall system which drives our characters in their fight against the hordes of evil. We wanted to make something that would be:

• not TOO complicated, so that the player instantly understands most of the concepts.
• BUT with enough depth so that we can make interesting bonuses in our perks, items, etc…

In fact we actually already re-worked this particular system twice since we started thinking about The Last Spell! Right now we have come up with something that seems to be working pretty well on paper. We still have to playtest it in our next prototype, but we are pretty confident it should do the trick.

Characters

So our characters have several components that define them:

• Attributes: that’s the basic stats of the heroes.
• Traits: bonus features that can modify Attributes and even some more advanced things.
• Perks: level-up bonuses with passive abilities.
• Skills: active abilities of the heroes that you can use to make actions, in battle or in-between.

The skills overall come from the equiped items, and mostly from the weapons, so I’ll talk about it in another blog post ;).

The Perks and Traits are more advanced features, so today I’ll mostly be talking about the Attributes of the characters.

They are divided into 3 groups:

Basics:

• Health: pretty basic, when it reaches 0 the character dies.
• Mana: used to cast more powerful and magical skills.
• Action Points (AP): used for launching skills.
• Move Points (MP): moving 1 tile costs 1 MP, and some skills can cost MPs too.

[...]

Thanks Sztaszov!

The tactical RPG The Last Spell has been announced for 2020:

What if Final Fantasy Tactics & Dynasty Warriors had an illegitimate daughter?

The Last Spell is a turn-based tactical RPG immersed in roguelite mechanics in which you lead a team of hardened heroes to defend the last bastion of humanity against hordes of monsters.
A Dark Fantasy Tactical RPG with Rogue lite elements
This is the end. War and a bunch of crazy mages provoked The Cataclysm. A mysterious mist filled with hellish monsters enveloped most of the world. They said that those who entered the mist were killed, driven mad, or even turned into monstrous abonimations themselves. Only a few Havens keep up the fight against the Hordes of bloodthirsty monsters that come out at night from this strange purple mist.

Days were quiet and peaceful: they could take time to organize themselves, heal their wounds and search the surroundings for anything useful. But the nights… The mist thickened and from their bowels unleashes hordes of mutated monsters, craving for blood and magic.

In this glorious mix of pixel art and dark fantasy setting, you lead a group of hardened warriors whose only purpose in life is to desperately defend the last of the mages while they try to cast The Last Spell, and banish all magic from this world. And maybe save us all. Maybe.

loading...

Features

Turn-Based Tactics:

• Manage your squad of hardened heroes
• Scarce resources: use Mana wisely to survive
• Class-less skill trees and bonus perks

Hordes of Evil:

• Tons of enemies to slay, burn, shock and slice!
• Dozens of enemy types with different behaviors
• Impressive skills to help you slaughter ’em all

Protect the City:

• Rebuild a safe Haven from the remains of civilization
• Build walls, traps and watchtowers
• Protect the circle of magic at all costs!

Roguelite Elements:

• You will fail… but everytime you do, you’ll grow stronger
• Procedurally generated Enemy waves, Maps, Characters and Weapons
• Nasty bosses