I do love a boardgame where you reveal the tiles as you play. Sure, I also enjoy turning over all the pieces at the beginning of a game of Settlers of Catan and taking in all the tiles and trying to work out a strategy based on which resources are clustered near which port, but that’s not the same as a game like Betrayal at House on the Hill, where you all start together in one single room and unveil the architecture of the house tile by tile as you explore. You have that same strategic eye, looking at the function and threat each room holds, but because the house is still being built, your plan can’t become fixed. You have to reassess the layout of the building with each new piece and, of course, when you hit the moment in the game where one player betrays you the real danger arrives, all that planning now has to be twisted to oppose the new threat.
Volatiles is an action game that plays with that same sense of strategy and mystery. It starts with you waking in a strange facility with little sense of what brought you there. The scientists around you say they’re helping you, but they’re the same people who keep dunking you into a sensory deprivation tank and forcing you to fight the monsters in your mind.
It’s just possible they don’t have your best interests at heart.
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After you’re dunked in the tank, you begin a new roguelike run in your haunted mind. That begins with just a single tile, which is immediately swamped by nightmarish creatures. Defeat the wave and you level up, which lets you place another tile next to the first, expanding the map, bolstering your character’s skills, and summoning a new wave of enemies.
If you’ve played games like Blue Prince and Into The Restless Ruins, you may be familiar with this sort of approach to progressing through a run. With each move or turn expanding the map and adding to the functions and abilities you’ve access to.
Though, when I put these games to Volatiles creators, they tell me they had other inspirations. “This was back around March of 2023, and at that point none of us had ever heard of Blue Prince,” game director Ian Dovhan tells me. “I don’t think it was even announced back then. The inspiration for the map building originally came from playing Dorfromantik.” Dovhan says the chill strategy game’s tile-placing mechanics got him thinking about applying them to something more aggressive. “What if you had an action-survivor-like game where you built the map yourself?,” he asks. “What if your character’s strength was dictated by how you build? What if weapons, abilities, and health were all tied into the environment itself?”
The tiles you place aren’t all created equal, some award new weapons, others buff particular stats, but they all also have their own architecture which can be useful in upcoming firefights. This means that as you’re building the character you want to play, you also need to think about the geography you’re laying down. “You can decide to make a labyrinthine hellscape, at the risk of trapping yourself,” lead software engineer Fritz Copes says. “You can build big open spaces, but you might run out of cover and escape routes. You could prioritise getting autonomous turrets and exploding barrels. Sometimes you might have to choose between advancing towards a point of interest, healing, or an ability that makes your bullets bounce off walls. Those are the kind of strategic dilemmas we’re always trying to throw at the player.”
There’s another layer to this process, too. You are, after all, a character with no memory and these tiles describe who your character is, what kinds of strengths and weaknesses you have. As you expand out the map and alter your tools, you’re seeing a reflection of your character screen. It’s almost like a cartographer’s take on a character sheet. How much of this expansion is redescribing who your character always was versus inscribing a new personality?
I might be reading too much into the mechanics and the metaphors, but if I am, then at least with that stripped away, you still have a gory survival shooter with an interesting tile-placing mechanic.