Dark fantasy strategy game Gord looks like a Diablo town manager

pcgamer.com:

Remember the crappy little starting town in Diablo 2? It's an encampment(opens in new tab), technically: A few tents and wagons with a wall to keep out skeletons. Now imagine that instead of a hero passing through on their way to fight the devil, you're the mayor of that awful place. That's the scenario in Gord, more or less.

Managing a Slavic folklore-inspired dark fantasy town doesn't look simple or easy, mind you. From the look of the new Gord gameplay video embedded above, it's as thankless a job as running an ice age city in Frostpunk, and there's a lot to it: resource gathering, urban design, citizen management, and some RPG adventuring and combat.

We mostly see adventuring in the new 16-minute gameplay video, in which Stan Just, a former Witcher 3 producer who's now CEO of Gord developer Covenant, walks us through a basic quest. His town's subjects are mad about poisoned eggs in the swamp, which prompts him to take a party into the muck to kill «foulspawn.»

The generic-feeling quest is a bit of a letdown, but perhaps the interesting part of Gord is not the monsters but the people. Your subjects have strengths («fighting flair,» «furiosity») and weaknesses («exploring incapability,» «boiling blood»), as well as varying experience in tasks such as mining, fighting, and food preparation. They can be gathered into parties, arranged in tactical formation, and clicked out into the wilds beyond the town to find treasure and fight monsters. Aside from bodily damage and death, your subjects can experience psychological damage as a result of all the dark fantasy violence they deal with, especially when someone they're related to is involved in whatever gooey beast encounter caused the trauma. Keeping your townsfolk both