Kill monstrous hordes until you can delete magic forever in tactics RPG The Last Spell

So, as we all knew they would, wizards broke the world and now there's purple hell mist filled with monsters that come for us each night. To fix this, they're making the wizards do a spell that deletes magic from existence forever. Now you just have to keep them alive for the days of uninterrupted casting it'll take to pull it off.

That's the metal as hell setup for The Last Spell, a tactical RPG roguelite that has you in control of an all-too-small band of heroes whose job it is to defend a crumbling city and its mages against the onrushing hordes of mutants, demons, zombies, and demon zombie mutants. Every day you spend resources to build up the town and level up your heroes, while every night you fight off a horde of monsters to the last gasp. When you lose, well, you've earned upgrades for next time.

It's a pretty cool setup, where movement and positioning are just as important as damage, and squeezing all the potential you can out of every last action point is vital to survive. The characters you recruit, meanwhile, are very customizable. Skills are determined by weapon held, so there's not so much classes as specializations in different pieces of equipment backed up by stats. Finding good combos of weapon and role is part of the fun.

The Last Spell was developed by Ishtar Games, who previously developed Dead in Bermuda and Dead in Vinland. Ishtar's next game is Lakeburg Legacies, a village management game about not just trade and crops, but playing matchmaker to create ideal couples and happy people. The Last Spell is published by The Arcade Crew, an indie publisher based in Paris.

We first reported on The Last Spell based on its demo 2021 before taking the early access release for a spin. "I have never seen so many enemies in a turn-based tactics game," said Tom Sykes at the time, though he did feel that early build got a bit repetitive.

The Last Spell is yet another of the seemingly infinite firehose of tactical and strategy RPGs that indie gaming is blessing us with. There are so many SRPGs on PC that midway through last year I had to publish an article just gawking at them all, and Jody did the same earlier this year with his list of strategy RPGs to look forward to in 2023. I think it's a real statement that there are so many coming that neither of our lists included The Last Spell.

You can find The Last Spell for $25 on GOG and Steam, or at 10% off until March 23.

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.