XCOM meets Rashomon in Vaunted, a tactical RPG where your characters can rewrite history from their perspective

I'm not sure I've entirely got my head around Vaunted, the latest game to emerge from the stable of Hooded Horse, PC gaming's hottest publisher. Revealed at last week's Xbox Partner Preview, Vaunted is a sci-fi tactical RPG where you control a motley crew of thieves and mercenaries forced to do the bidding of a criminal syndicate after an ambitious expedition goes horribly awry.

I understand the bones of Vaunted well enough, though, I do have some questions. The game involves assembling motley crews of miscreants and leading them into battle in a run-based format. A key gimmick is that Vaunted lets you switch between turn-based combat and real-time third-person action. For example, you can deploy specific abilities and plan manoeuvres in your fixed turn, then switch to real-time to move a character into cover or dodge incoming projectiles.

I can see how that would work, though I'm intrigued to see how developer Lost Lake Games stops this from giving the player a massive advantage. Where things get particularly intriguing (and confusing) is how Vaunted approaches narrative.

Vaunted's story revolves primarily around three characters, the mercenary Genril, the lizardlike thief Dyse, and the warlock Kyvaath. Each of these characters has their own perspective on how the story plays out, and if a hero dies, you can rewrite the tale from the perspective of a different hero.

At first I thought this was some sort of fancy rewind function, like Call of Juarez: Gunslinger's "No, that's not how it happened" segments, only dynamic, with the death of a character pushing them into a different branch of the story. But since Vaunted is a run-based game, this wouldn't make much sense. Instead, it appears to be more of a way to spice up those individual runs, with losing characters becoming an opportunity to explore different viewpoints of those who remain.

However the storytelling works, Lost Lake Games says that "Every conversation you have, and every decision you make—and who you make it as—can change how things play out, for better or for worse." There's a roguelite element involved too. As characters progress through a run, their stories gain "credibility". When they die, you can spend that credibility to unlock stat upgrades, making them more likely to survive the next run.

It's an intriguing combination of ideas. Lost Lake Studios is led by James Phinney, who was lead designer on StarCraft and director of game design on both Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2. So he knows a thing or two about bringing new concepts to existing genres. There's no firm release date for Vaunted yet, but it's due to launch later this year.