Tharsis, The Turn-Based Roguelike With Dice, Lands In January

I’d been getting Tharsis confused with Stellaris a lot recently, and thinking about Master of Orion, Alpha Centauri and the Rising Tide expansion for Beyond Earth was making me wonder what on Earth (or in space is probably more appropriate) was happening to Choice Provisions’ turn-based roguelike.

After all, it’s unfamiliar territory for the studio which was previously called Gaijin Games. They previously made the BIT.TRIP series of runners, which is a whole different ball game from something set in space. With dice. And permadeath.

Fortunately, we’ll be able to find out very soon how it all plays out.

The Steam page for the turn-based strategy game popped up early this morning, and it comes with a release date: January 2016.

I’ve pinged the developers to find out how much pricing will be at launch, since there’s no price listed on the Steam page. What’s worth noting is that you’ll apparently need an Intel i5 at a minimum to run the game, even if you’re playing on Mac.

The rest of the minimum requirements are as follows:

MINIMUM:
OS: Windows 7 x64
Processor: Intel Core i5 5xxx
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Graphics: DirectX 11 compatible graphics card (Intel HD 5000, NVIDIA GeForce 400 or Radeon HD 5000)
DirectX: Version 11
Hard Drive: 2 GB available space

That’s all the hard info available, at least what’s beyond the premise of the game anyway. It’ll be interesting to see how Tharsis mixes the nightmarish RNG of dice rolls into a roguelike. The genre already uses plenty of RNG as it is, but it’ll be interesting to see how people react with having it so upfront in the form of dice.