Solium Infernum Demo

Toying with the legions of Hell and the avatars of despair may not sound like a weekend activity meant to relax your nerves, but there are ways to turn demons, dark rituals and unending sorrow into exciting prospects, with the right attitude. After all, war involving legions of the damned instead of tanks and guns is still war, which is why it would translate very well into a strategy game of some sorts.

Solium Infernum is a turn-based strategy game that takes this idea to the next level and provides you with a chance to take claim over Hell itself, as well as conquer Pandaemonium and subjugate the most fearsome lords of darkness ever known. There are no intricate storylines that try to explain the war, there are no badly written characters to ruin the mood and nothing is held back when it comes to depth, lore and the freedom to act as you wish.

Speaking of which, you must really take into consideration the fact that the game can be downright impossible to play without first checking out a tutorial on how to get started. Actually, there is also a fifty-page manual you might want to shuffle through a couple of times, if you intend on really understanding how to approach the matches. Moreover, the rules are far from similar to anything you might have played, given the fact that they are a combination of TBS and trading card games, although a great deal of original mechanics have been implemented as well.

To illustrate the matters using an oversimplification, the main goal is to become the ruler of Hell and defeat the other players. In order to do so, you must make use of a variety of elements, starting from dark rituals to bless (curse?) your avatar with certain powers, to hiring legions of hell hounds, acquiring powerful artifacts, and demanding tributes from the other dark lords. Every action is classified as an order to your forces and it takes one turn for these orders to be executed, although it depends on their nature.

Another great aspect about the game is the artwork and the graphical design, since the drawings that represent the creatures, the avatars and mostly everything else are masterfully created to inspire a certain atmosphere. The map itself is hex-based and not unlike something you might have seen in other TBS games, but it is quite detailed and filled with fantastic contraptions of pure evil.

In the end, it is quite difficult to convey the novelty of Solium Infernum, mostly because there are very few similar games one can compare it to. However, uncovering its secrets is definitely part of the fun and there are plenty of possibilities when it comes to how the matches evolve and how they end. If you also happen to be interested in the occult and you are not easily offended by disturbing images, this is the way to go.

Note: Here are some tutorials you can check out to help you get started, as well as a lengthy manual that explains things further and helps you understand the underlying concepts sitting at the core of the game.