Excellent tidings, y'all. If you've been following this feature for any of its nearly six years in service you're probably used to seeing me add figurative asterisks after every perceived technical issue, with the caveat that my system might be comparatively less able to perform the task at hand constructed as it is out of twigs, berries, and tree sap. No longer! Thanks to the Black Friday sales I've now procured a semi-decent mid-range PC that ought to be capable of running any Indie without issue, though I might hesitate to stick on a Forza Horizon 5 or Halo Infinite with 120fps and the ray-tracing going full blast. I mean, I'd hesitate to play either of those regardless but all the same I'm hoping for some slightly more accurate reviewing, at least on the technical side of things.

That has no bearing on this week's game, of course, as it's a much more down-to-earth (and, thankfully, graphically sedate) adventure/tactical RPG hybrid concerning the titular prestigious northeastern boarding school and its equally titular club for tactics and strategy fans, set in 1981 with all the Stranger Things-esque era-appropriate references you could want. Essentially, the Wintermoor Tactics Club is that school's D&D Club, though in this universe the venerable board game is known as Catacombs & Curses instead. The protagonist, Alicia, is someone who appreciates the creative side of C&C and dreams of writing and publishing her own adventures, often working as a mediator between the other two Tactics Club members: the rules-obsessed president Colin and the rebellious prankster Jacob. Their quiet days spent around a table full of miniatures are suddenly threatened by the eccentric headmaster Mr. Enfield calling for an intra-club snowball fight elimination tournament: any club that loses their fight is summarily disbanded, its members scattered to the winds. The whys of this tournament are a slowly overarching narrative development that necessarily take a backseat to the hows: that is, how the Tactics Club hopes to defeat the next round's opponents. However, as anyone who completed the prologue of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance should know, snowball fights aren't too dissimilar to a tactical RPG battle...

Wintermoor Tactics Club borrows a card from Persona's tarot deck in establishing a gameplay loop that seesaws between its (relatively) mechanically heavy RPG side and a lighter social-sim side, the former set on battlefields both imagined and real and the latter across the rest of the schoolgrounds. By helping students out with their issues or growing closer to members of the Tactics Club—which continues to expand as other clubs are dissolved—the player earns upgrades for their units that either provide general positive increments to their skills and overall stats or even might alter their utility in some way. As an example, there are upgrades that might change a physical unit's attacks into magical ones, which would make them more helpful on maps against opponents that have strong physical defenses but nothing in the way of protection from magic. In addition to side-quests that have you strolling around the school using your empathy and best judgement to resolve issues your schoolmates are having, there are also challenge maps in which you must figure out how to employ a highlighted character's unique talents to reach a desired outcome: objectives on this map might include bewitching enough enemies to cause them to eliminate each other, or managing to keep everyone but your tank free from harm. All optional, but the earned upgrades are worth it for the versatility they provide and also make the core game's future missions more approachable too. Plus, a side-quest involved having to draw a horse using an in-game paint tool, and that's not something you're likely to find in a lot of tactics games.

As for said tactics, the game is deliberately streamlined for accessibility in the same manner as something like a Paper Mario, where numbers rarely budge outside the double-digits and few battles last more than ten minutes, but still manage to be tactically involved due to the many conditions you need to meet for a perfect score: number of turns taken, amount of damage received, etc. You can expect to beat any of the game's battles handily enough on your first attempt, but it might take some savvy upgrade customization or a new choice of team composition to get the best results. This aspect of the game actually reminds me quite a bit of Into the Breach: there's none of that especially clever procedural-generation that can conjure up maps wholesale that still have intended ideal solutions for you to intuit, but its pre-crafted scenarios offer a similar manner of "well, there has to be a correct path" puzzle considerations.

Between the simplified (but, again, not always easy to master) battles and the more narrative-focused aspects, I might recommend Wintermoor as being a good entry-level game for a genre that has certainly seen a lot of patronage of late—Giant Bomb's eyeing a "Best Tiles" category for GOTY, I'm almost certain—but very few that aren't a little intimidating to jump into. Even the mainstream appeal of a Fire Emblem or XCOM is tempered by how much permadeath and restarts those games make part of their DNA. Wintermoor has a gentle heart, something of a Hogwarts-esque school mystery to its main narrative drive, and plenty of little talky asides to break up the tactical scenarios if need be. I'd hesitate to put it in the same boat as 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, which is a much more ambitious and confident product, but Wintermoor knows how to balance its two halves in a similar fashion so you won't ever get too sick of either.

I'm presently at the start of the "Winter Break" chapter, which promises more emphasis on the tactical maps and less so on the adventuring, set as it is over the holidays during which most of the students I would otherwise be helping have returned home. My last snowball fight was against the New Wave Appreciation Club, which comprised of a goth rock girl calling herself Baphomet (real name Sarah) and three goons dressed like Devo, which is typical of the unusual clubs you might meet in battle or bump into post-elimination around campus. A part of me wishes the game would lean harder into its comedic, out-there side—I can just about imagine a Persona or Like a Dragon or Danganronpa game handling this sort of larger-than-life "Battle of the School Clubs" theme—but I can appreciate that its relatable story about acceptance, teenage insecurity, and empathetic problem-solving probably needs some grounding to work. It's definitely a game I could see myself pecking away at for the foreseeable future, even while The Lands Between and its rogue demigods threaten to consume the rest of the month.

Rating: 4 out of 5.