Swedish developer, The Bearded Ladies, are no strangers to mixing stealth and turn-based tactics with dystopian worlds. The Miasma Chronicles is their third outing, and it shows as the game flexes its muscles with heated combat exchanges and captivating world building. It’s in those endeavors the game shines brightest, but when the characters and their journey get added into the mix, things go dark. Marred by cheesy dialogue, so-so voice acting, and a story that doesn’t quite live up to the world around it, The Miasma Chronicle feels less like a sci-fi epic and more like a middling sci-fi B movie.
America as we know it has fallen. Years of peace, prosperity, and a thriving humanity are cut short by the titular Miasma, a mysterious substance that corrupts and divides the country. Players take on the role of Elvis, a teenager abandoned by his mother in Sedentary, a mining settlement in the heart of wasteland Kentucky. Armed with a mysterious glove that can control the Miasma and his robotic brother, Diggs, Elvis sets out to find his mom and save the world. It’s a tale full of your usual sci-fi (and RPG) tropes. There’s a precocious chosen one in over their head, a corny robot companion, an absent parent, and team members harboring secrets from one another. When characters are interesting, dabbling in the tropes is forgivable. This is not the case with The Miasma Chronicles.
The writing is more focused on the plot and world building. It’s not an outrageous thing to be guilty of in this genre, but The Miasma Chronicles tips the scales too far in that direction and fails to create a strong connection between players and the characters. Elvis and Diggs are brothers by chance, but the full extent of their relationship is never fleshed out. Their interactions almost always revolve around what they’re doing to drive the plot forward. There’s a small moment early on where Diggs gets protective of Elvis after a new member joins your party. This is a nice exchange between the brothers, I only wish there were more like it to help develop the characters further. Cheesy dialogue doesn’t help much here either. It’s played for laughs and mostly falls flat, especially when used in serious moments. For example, a bad guy turning the tables on your party and then ending his monologue with “He rocks” just takes the weight away from the situation.
Where The Miasma Chronicles falls flat in character building, it almost makes up for in world building. The variety of enemies and wasteland biomes kept me anticipating what I was going to run into next. There are multiple factions across the game’s three large sections; From humanoid frogs holed up in a reptile themed amusement park, to robot warriors duking it out in an arena in the Nevada Badlands.
Exploring the world between combat encounters, players can dig up additional world flavor from notes scattered around the world. I rolled my eyes at the amount of notes that ended abruptly, but they were still appreciated. My personal favorite world building came in the form of pre-Miasma robots that Elvis can reactivate and interrogate to discover their purpose. There are also side quests that yield fun fights and opportunities to stock up on additional supplies. The game is good about communicating if you’re prepared for these encounters or not. Encounter’s where you’re severely overpowered will come with a warning as you enter the area and give you the ideal level range you should be to complete the encounter. Backtracking is thankfully not an issue, as you can fast travel to any of the areas on your map at any point in the game.
The game’s combat follows the tactical stylings of XCOM and its contemporaries. Each character gets two allotted action points per turn to move and attack enemies. Limited to three party members at a time, you are always outnumbered. To mitigate this, players can sneak around combat areas before the fight, and silently pick off enemies to thin out the herd. These stealth sections aren’t new territory for the developer, but they’re new to me, and I really enjoyed them. Sneaking around areas adds an additional layer of tactics. Fights that seem unwinnable become more and more manageable with each enemy picked off. These sections also provide a great opportunity for scouting out a perfect place to set up for your all-out assault. Even with a handful of enemies taken out, fights can still present a thrilling challenge. Carrying out a stealth section and then following it up with a successful assault was gratifying and had me looking forward to each new encounter. I do wish the game was a little more forthcoming with silenced weapons. Many of the early stealth sections saw me relying on a single character to sneak around, while the others waited for the main assault.
There are some encounters where you are ambushed. These are not my favorite fights, as they shine a light on some of the game’s combat issues. First and foremost, players do not heal between fights. If you want to heal, you either have to use the scarce Medipods or level up. Medipods can be found randomly throughout the world or purchased at a store. With how much I used them, I found myself prioritizing the purchase of Medipods over saving for new weapons. This was something that I felt derailed my progression in later encounters. I didn’t feel like I was getting stronger, due to spending all my money on health items, instead of purchasing stronger weapons.
Cooldowns don’t reset between encounters. If you use an ability that ends an encounter and it has a two-turn cooldown, that cooldown won’t start until the next encounter. Getting caught with your pants down like that is especially unfortunate in an already stressful ambush where the enemy outnumbers you three to one. These encounters quickly devolve into tossing every projectile you can at the enemy while moving frantically to get out of crosshairs. I get that I’m supposed to be unprepared for these ambush encounters, but the fact that health and cooldowns don’t reset for these fights left me feeling like the game was setting me up to fail. I can’t recall one ambush where I didn’t come out inches away from defeat.
There are multiple ways to upgrade your characters between encounters. Each character can hold two separate guns that can be switched in and out mid-combat. I do wish there was a little more weapon variety, aside from ricocheting guns and silenced guns, everything else just feels like a machine gun variant with similar stats. You can buff your guns with scopes and attachments, increasing things like attack range or damage against certain enemy types. Players can also buff characters with power cores, granting you additional health, shields, and movement.
Each character contains a skill tree that can be upgraded and degraded at any time. If a new skill you want is unlocked and your one skill point away, you can remove a previously selected skill and use that refunded point toward a new skill. This opens the door for experimentation across your playthroughs. There’s a variety of skills on these trees, with my personal favorites being the combo of Digg’s Sprint & Shoot and Tackle abilities, which pair well together for flattening enemies. My one oddball complaint about the skill trees is that Overwatch is a skill that has to be unlocked. That’s just weird.
Elvis’ glove grants him some additional abilities known as Miasma Powers. These include abilities such as spinning up a Miasma tornado that throws enemies across the map or summoning a witchdoctor to heal your party. Miasma Powers can also be upgraded with active and passive skills found on computer chips spread throughout the world. These abilities add a little more variety to the actions you can take each turn, but they do fall victim to the aforementioned cooldown problem and are made worse by some of their ridiculously long cooldowns.
The Miasma Chronicles has a lot of promise on its surface. It’s a game where you can sneak around an amusement park courtyard, snipe humanoid frogs, zap enemies with lightning powers, and smash things with your bruiser of a robot. The merit it gains from strong world building and a fun gameplay loop of stealth and combat is immediately lost from balance issues in combat and progression, a lackluster story, and little character development. It’s a game you can love in pieces, but when everything comes together you start to see the holes.
