The Last Spell is a hard roguelite game in which you have to guard a small village. Here are some ideas that could help you get where you want to go.

The Last Spell is an amazing mix of the turn-based strategy, resource building, and rogue-like features and mechanics from Fire Emblem. You have to keep a circle of mages living for a certain number of nights so they can cast the last spell that will drive back the forces of evil and let people live on.

You fight monsters at night, but you get ready for them during the day by building walls and armouries, giving your units new gear, and getting new heroes to join the fight. When you lose, you have a chance to get lasting upgrades that will help you go further in future runs. Yes, it sounds like a lot because it is. So, what should you pay attention to when you first start The Last Spell?

Don’t Start Near The Mist

If you want to fight or just want to get ahead of your undead enemies, you might think it’s a good idea to put your troops near the Mist line. This is the furthest thing from the truth.

You might act first, but your enemies get set up first. If you start too close to the mist, your troops might get surrounded. It is possible to fight your way out, but why put yourself in a bad situation to begin with? Also, you can’t attack enemies beyond the Mist, so it’s useless to start that close. In the end, it’s a fight of attrition because the enemies have to come to you, and they’re slow. Instead of just getting in their faces, use that to your benefit.

You Can Tailor The Difficulty

Even though The Last Spell can be very hard at times, the Omen system gives you a lot of power over how hard the game will actually be.

Far from being scary, the Omen system lets you add power-ups that make your run easier by giving your heroes bonuses or perks. Every map has a set number of slots for these Omens, which can use a different number of slots based on how strong they are.

If the game is too hard, you can play it on Boundless Mode, which lets you use more Omens and access more powerful ones. If the game is too easy, you can unlock Apocalypse modifiers for maps after you beat them. The game becomes much harder because of these changes. You can play harder Apocalypse levels when you beat easier ones.

You Can Get Meta Rewards In-Run

Most roguelites have tools that don’t do anything during a run or are only given after the run is over. In the same way, if a roguelite pays you for doing things like getting achievements, it will also do so after a run.

These meta awards are meant to help you in future runs while having little or no effect on your current run. But The Last Spell is different because you can not only get these meta-rewards in-run, but you can also spend them.

You can use this to your advantage by checking the Oraculum to see if you have enough Tainted Essences to unlock things with the Dark-aligned Divinity or if you have done any feats of Prowess to unlock things with the Light-aligned Divinity.

Wounding Many Beats Killing Few

When a unit gets enough damage, it becomes Wounded. Until it is healed past the Wounded threshold, it has a negative effect. This is important to remember for your Heroes, but it’s much more important to remember when you’re handling your enemies.

If you want to keep the hordes at bay, don’t try to kill them all at once. Instead, spread out the damage and hurt a lot of them, then finish them off in a later turn. Wounds slow down and weaken enemy units, limiting how far they can move and how much damage they can do. This lets you deal with a larger number of enemies because you can kite or tank them as you cut down their numbers.

Clicking Is Slow, Use The Hotkeys

As with most complicated games, you can play by clicking or otherwise only using the mouse, but it may make the game less fun. It’s much faster and easier to learn the hotkeys for your skills than to click everywhere, especially when you’re in battle.

Your hotkeys for fighting will be the number bar or the numbers one through zero, though you probably won’t have that many skills for it to go that far. You can also cancel any choices you made by pressing the enter key. If you press Tab, you can change your weapon set, and Enter ends your turn. That should be enough to start with.

You Can Undo Movement, But Only Once

The worst thing about turn-based strategy games is when you accidentally click on something or do something else that you immediately regret. This is especially true when something is moving.

If you make a mistake, you can fix it as long as you do it right away. When you move a unit, there is an undo button on the left side of the screen, right above the numbers of the unit you just moved. You can only do it once, so don’t move your unit five times before you want to do it again. Also, once you hit, you can’t change that move, so there are no do-overs.

The Quick Glance Character Banners

When you first start a campaign, you only have to think about two units, so it’s not too hard to lose them on the battlefield or keep track of their action and move points. But later on, when there are 200 enemies on the screen and you have to control six units, things can get a little crazy.

In the top right area of your screen, there is a banner with the names of each unit you are in charge of. Not only do they show each unit’s possible action points in orange and movement points in green, but you can also click on a unit’s portrait in the banner and go straight to it, letting you use up any last-minute action points.

Build Mines And Scavengers First

In between fighting off hordes of monsters, you’ll be building and fixing a small town to help feed your units. There are a lot of things to choose from, like shrines, armouries, people who make weapons, and even an inn where you can recruit new heroes.

What should you build first, though? You should also build mines for money and scavengers for building materials. Building and improving your towns gives you more workers who can do more things. Once those are built and improved a few times, you’ll be well on your way to a stable economy that will last until your last night.

Aim For Goddess Of Light Unlocks

In The Last Spell, there are two ways to buy upgrades that are like roguelikes. Each night that goes well, you’ll get tainted essence that you can use to buy upgrades for the Goddess of Darkness. However, there’s another Goddess who can help you as well.

Spending tainted essence on unlocks is not the only way to improve the Goddess of Light. For each improvement, you have to do a small task while you play, like getting one of your units to 300 health. These upgrades are very helpful and fun goals to work towards as you try to make it to the last night.

Don’t Waste Your Tainted Essence

On the other hand, the improvements for the Goddess of Darkness are just as useful. Spending your tainted essence on these upgrades is much easier than doing mini-quests for the Goddess of Light, but be careful: too many upgrades don’t always mean good things. The Goddess of Darkness gives you upgrades that, among other things, give you more tools to choose from.

Even though it might be tempting to open all of the weapons, you should know that doing so will make it harder to get the weapons you like. Instead, you should focus on finding the weapons you like to use the most and then improving to find better or rarer versions of those weapons. If you don’t know what guns you want to focus on, you can get permanent buffs for your current and future characters instead. Even though these are small, they can add up, and they apply to every word that comes after.

Double Stack Damage Types (Ranged With Ranged Or Poison With Poison)

Most of the time, your units will gain enough experience each night to level up, especially when they are new. Levelling up has two parts: increasing base stats like physical damage or the chance of a critical hit, and gaining perks that give unique bonuses, like coagulation, which gives your unit armour equal to a portion of their daily health regeneration.

Also, each unit can take two weapons. It might be tempting to make your units “jacks of all trades” by giving them a wide range of weapons and damage types, but that might not be the best idea. Instead, try giving units two different weapons that do the same damage, like two long weapons or two magical weapons. So, you only have to improve one stat, but your units still have some flexibility.

Different Colors Don’t Always Mean An Upgrade

Like most games with loot, loot comes in different types that are shown by colour. From most common to least common, they are colourless, green, blue, and red. But it’s important to know what these colours mean and how equipment can be better in different ways.

The numbers under equipment range from none to four. These numbers raise the equipment’s base stats, while the rarity of the colour raises the number of extra effects it has, like a higher chance to hit. Rarer colours don’t always mean better tools, so be careful when you’re looking to improve your gear.

Keep Reminders (You Have Unused Workers!)

As we’ve already said, The Last Spell has a lot to keep track of. Action points, movement, the number of people left, gold, and a lot of other things. Also, once you finish a turn, that’s it, you can’t go back.

So that you don’t end a day without building any walls, Snake Game gives you reminders of what you can do before moving on to the next step. If you look in the menus, you’ll find checkboxes that will tell you if you’re ending a turn before you’ve used all of a resource, like if you still have action points or more than a certain amount of gold or building resources. These are turned on by default, and unless you know a lot about the game, you shouldn’t change them. This will save you a lot of trouble, especially at the beginning.

RETREAT!

When one of two things happens, your attempt will fail. Either the mage circle in the middle of town is destroyed, or all of your units die in battle. When it comes to nighttime monsters, your units are often your only and most valuable possession.

So, don’t feel bad about hiding behind your walls, homes, mines, or anything else. Even the magic circle itself can take a hit or two. You can always rebuild burned buildings and walls, and the city can handle a bit of chaos, but it’s much harder to replace fallen units, and they usually aren’t as good as the ones you’ve been using from the start.