John couldn’t make it, so last night Maria, Andrew, and I made another attempt at Soul Raiders.
As a reminder:
- Last August we played Chapter 1 and got through it successfully in a single night.
- In September we started on Chapter 2. It’s a bigger and more complex story. We were only able to go part of the way before we had to call it a night.
- In December we were able to continue with Chapter 2. We lost.
Soul Raiders is designed to have each Chapter played repeatedly. If you fail, you can use what you learned in a previous attempt to inform your decisions when you play it again; the game explicitly states this. If you win, you can still replay the Chapter, essentially farming it for character improvements and to explore corners of the story you might not have seen in a previous playthrough (much like BG3).
Last night, we were successful. In fact, we achieved three “red stars” (conditions for victory) out of the two required!
The principle we’ve learned is that if you’ve played a Soul Raiders chapter before, whether you win or lose, subsequent playthroughs will be much easier. As I mentioned before, if you grow too familiar with a Chapter you can use their pool of alternate locations to make the game more interesting.
We look forward to facing the third and final Chapter of Soul Raiders!
My thanks to Maria for the last three cat photos.