The Last Spell · published
Hello everyone!
Phew, third blogpost already about the DLC! We’re getting closer to the release (early 2026!) and we’re making great progress on it.
This month, we organized a private beta with some selected members of our community, and that beta allowed us to improve some of the new systems (more on that in the blogpost!). We want to thank our amazing beta players for their involvement and their many comments and feedback posts <3
And we’re VERY happy to finally announce the name of the DLC: The Last Spell: Tales of Torment!
Today, we’re going to talk about another new mechanic of the DLC: Ordeals! And once again, I’ll let Victor, game designer on The Last Spell, take over this blogpost!
Hello once again! I’m here to talk about Ordeals, the third new mechanic introduced in this DLC. If you recall the diagram from the last blogpost, here’s what I’m talking about:
So, what’s an ordeal ? Ordeals are short-term objectives that will appear during nights, and let you gain Memories if you complete their requirements. Here’s an example:
Ordeals are composed of:
A main action: dealing damage, killing enemies, using skills... it requires the player to do the following action a given amount of times.
One or two additional constraints: in this case, there are two. One is “Target has a Negative Alteration”, and the other is “Target is at full health”. This means that the player has to deal damage to enemies that have a negative alteration AND are at full health.
A time limit: the player has to complete the Ordeal within the time limit. After that, the ordeal will disappear. The time limit generally ranges between 1 and 4 turns.
A reward: how many memories the ordeal will grant if you complete it.
We have a multitude of actions and constraints. The general idea of Ordeals is to force the player to do something they would not naturally do, so that it is an added challenge. Here are a few examples:
There are also Ordeals that require you NOT to do something for a given amount of turns:
Now that you know how an ordeal works and what it looks like, here’s a bit more about the system in its entirety, across a whole night.
Each night, the player has a “quota” of 3 ordeals to accomplish. If that amount is reached, a certain amount of Memories is awarded as a bonus, which we call the Covenant Bonus. After that, all current ordeals disappear, and no other ordeals can be completed for the night.
For the record, this is a recent change we have made after feedback from our beta testers. Before, we had no limit on the amount of Ordeals players could complete during the night. This meant that, in order to maximize the Memories you obtained, you had to try and complete every single Ordeal that showed up. Because of this, Ordeals quickly turned into frustrating chores for our players.
With the Covenant system, players just have to find 3 ordeals they want to complete every night, and can thus ignore the ones they dislike or find too difficult to achieve in their current situation. Generally speaking, during a night, 6 to 8 ordeals will show up, which means you have to complete -at best- 50% of them.
Now, in terms of UI, here’s where the ordeals will show up during the night:
To recapitulate our intentions: Ordeals are meant to break the repetitiveness you can sometimes encounter during runs, where every turn feels like it plays the same. These short-term challenges should change that, while making you progress toward the next Epiphany. They are also meant as a counterpart to Divergences. While Divergences can be planned for and are visible ahead of the night, Ordeals rely more on surprise and quick adaptation during the night.
That’s it for Ordeals, but I’ll keep this blogpost going for just a bit longer to show you a few more epiphanies.
As promised in the last Blogpost, here are a few more examples of Epiphanies that you will be able to activate in your runs. As a reminder, Epiphanies are bonuses that last for your entire run, and that can be obtained by collecting Memories (if you want more information on them, you can read the Blogpost here).
Less is more is an epiphany that grants a perk to all heroes. It grants a LOT of experience gain, but this bonus is reduced for each Hero you have.
This is an epiphany you will want to take if you like to focus more on having a small number of very strong Heroes, instead of recruiting a lot of Heroes.
Extended Reach is an Epiphany that increased the range of all melee skills, allowing them to reach one tile further.
And here we have Holy Ground, which grants a special perk to all your Heroes: as long as no enemies have entered the Haven during a night, the Hero gets +20% Damage.
Lastly: in the previous Blogpost, I teased a screenshot of what looked like new versions of existing weapons. Today, I’ll be presenting you what they are: Unique Weapons.
For each weapon, the DLC adds an Epiphany that grants the player a unique version of this weapon. Each of them also has a name.
These weapons have 3 main advantages:
Their damage automatically scales with the Hero’s level, so they will keep being relevant for the entire run
Their damage is adaptative
They have a unique new perk
They are Unique Items, so, like other Unique items, you can only equip one per Hero.
Here are two examples of what Unique Weapons look like:
Flayed is the Unique version of the Tome of Magic. It comes with the unique perk “Eye of the Storm”, which will automatically cast Stray Lightning and random enemies every 3 Mana Spent.
Bloodtendon is the unique version of the Shortbow. It has upgraded AoEs on all of its skills.
And this is just an extract of the many Epiphanies you’ll be able to play with in this DLC. Once again, we’ll show you a few more in the next Blogpost. See you next time!
As you may know, the Ishtar Games studio is made of two teams currently:
The “TLS” team, working on the DLCs and the post-release support of the game
The “Dead in Antares” team, working on the new game of the “Dead in” series
And, we’re very happy to announce that Dead in Antares is releasing on February 19th 2025!
(And don’t worry, we’ll have a release date for Tales of Torment DLC soon, and it’s coming out sooner than you may think).
The “Dead in” series and The Last Spell share a lot of the same DNA (complex, hard games with RPG elements), so if you liked The Last Spell, there’s a high chance you might find a lot to love in Dead in Antares! 😉
There’s a free demo for Dead in Antares, so feel free to try it yourself!
Take care, heroes! <3