Ex Sanguis Looks Like the Bloody Othercide I've Been Craving

I still remember the precise moment Othercide broke me. Not the first time a Daughter died — that was just Tuesday. No, it was the first time I had to sacrifice one of them deliberately, to resurrect another. The game asked me to pick which sorrowful clone of my own fractured mind gets fed into the grinder so a better one can live. I sat there for a while, looking at the porcelain face of the one I was about to lose, and thought: this is a family and a war crime at the same time.

So you'll understand why the first trailer for Ex Sanguis made me feel something close to hunger. Lightbulb Crew's new tactics RPG is out in September, and it looks like Othercide's angrier sibling — same pale, beautiful warriors, same gloopy metaphysical battlefield, same sense that every step is a negotiation with death. The playtest is live now, which honestly feels like a dare. How many times are you willing to walk into the abyss before the game actually launches?

My position is simple: I am absolutely in. Othercide was never a perfect game. It was stingy with information, punishing in ways that felt arbitrary, and the text did that pseudo-arcane thing where every line sounds like it was translated from a language that no one actually speaks. But the combat — that initiative system, the way you could interrupt turns and act in the cracks of enemy schedules — was electric. Ex Sanguis looks like it's doubling down on all of that, and I don't need to know anything else. I'll pay the toll.

Now for the unexpected connection, because I can't stop myself. Othercide's central horror — the mother who pushes her daughters into the fight, the constant cycle of sacrifice and replacement — took me back to Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War. That game's second generation is built on the children of your first-generation units, and if you weren't careful, you'd send a kid into battle who had no business being there, just because you wanted to win. Both games understand something that most tactics RPGs never touch: that loss isn't a number on a screen, it's a person you chose to throw away. The difference is that in Othercide — and apparently in Ex Sanguis — you're the one literally creating them from your own pain. The tragedy is closer to the source.

Beyond that, there's the visual language. The characters are sculpted, doll-like, fragile. The battlefields are chunky, visceral, dripping with things that never quite look like proper anatomy. That contrast is not just aesthetic garnish; it's the core emotion. You're moving these delicate creatures through a war crime canvas. Every critical hit feels like vandalism. I don't know how the playtest runs yet, but I've seen enough footage to know that the texture is intact.

It's also worth saying that Lightbulb Crew isn't just repeating itself. Ex Sanguis appears to lean harder into the blood magic, with the name literally meaning "from blood." There's a sense of economy to that — blood as resource, as lineage, as cost. I suspect the game will make you bleed quite a lot before it lets you win. I'm curious to see if the initiative system gets more openly experimental, or if they've found a way to make the outside-turn actions feel even more like cheating the game's own rules.

No, I haven't played the playtest yet. I'm writing this without having seen the final build, and I want to keep my expectations sharp. But I know what I need to know: Ex Sanguis is the product of a team that made one of the most quietly devastating tactics games of the last decade, and they're coming back with more of the same sadness, more of the same elegance, more of the same blood. The real question isn't whether I'm going to play it. The real question is how many times I'll let something beautiful die before I stop feeling the sting. Probably not as many as I think.