Studium: No Exit – Demo Preview Review (Patreon)

Disclaimer: I am not sponsored in any way by Watchtower Gaming, nor did they approach me for this review. I am writing this because of the positive experiences I have had while playing the game and also because this is exactly the kind of project I think should be supported by crowdfunding as it is a small independent studio putting out their first game.

What I am writing here is based exclusively on the TTS demo, which you can try out for yourself at the following link if you own Tabletop Simulator (TTS). That means I can only comment on the Hallway exploration, skirmish minion combat and the Boss Combat. Anything outside of that I would recommend you check out the Kickstarter for details (link below), you can set the page to “Remind Me” so you can go in and read through all the updates just before it finishes if you remain uncertain after this review.

I will be spoiling some elements of the demo; so if you want to experience that with fresh eye first; here are the relevant links.

Kickstarter Page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/studiumgames/studium-no-exit

Watchtower Gaming Website: https://watchtowergaming.com/

Tabletop Simulator (TTS): https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2970985558

BGG Page: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/379925/studium-no-exit

Studium: No Exit (hereafter referred to as No Exit) is a 1 to 4 player campaign/narrative structured boss battling dungeon crawler from the Seattle based Watchtower Gaming. Players will take the role of individuals who have formed a house and are set to exploring the labyrinthian Studium and slay the horrors inside. The overall thrust of this game is a combination of house management, equipment forging, dungeon exploration, combat and boss battling. One could call it a collision of Kingdom Death with Middara, Dungeon crawling and Fire Emblem. If you used that description that I certainly would nod my head in agreement.

Characters

In the demo four characters are controlled by the player(s); these are each from a different class; the classes we have here in the demo are the tanky Upperclassman, the semi-ranged signifier, the cleaver wielding, dagger throwing Sin-Eater and the ranged Toxophilite as pictured below:

The class card is placed on the pictured dashboard which has slots for a weapon, armor, accessory and their attached augments. We also have a set of scroll slots underneath, scrolls can be gained through a bunch of different sources, you'll find some during the demo.

There are also mechanics such as Insight, which is gained from scrolls, Class Points, which are used to activate class abilities and cohesion. You can experience the systems in the demo, there's not a lot of high level material on how these are used at this time, but they all have potential.

In truth, a lot of the sections here are intuitive for people who have played KDM; the fingerprints of that game are clear and readable here. That's not a disadvantage either; using familiar mechanics and designs while innovating where appropriate is something that is a great advantage to any game. We'll see when we get to the character sheets in particular.

Also these Dashboards are great references for players; everything is organised and laid out in a manner that means all players are using the same display system; you can easily glance over at another player's area and read what they have, what they can do and where they are with their health very quickly.

Weapons

Weapons have a very clean and clear to use design; they tell you what range they can be used at, how many dice you roll when attacking, their damage dice type (by colour) and any extra abilities they may have.  Due to the TTS mod's demo nature we are only getting to see the tip of the iceberg here, but mechanically I already see the vast potential in this system. So we will have to wait and see how it advances and what augments can do to add texture, complexity and depth.

Dice rolls themselves use a D11 which is a modified D12 that goes from 0 to 11 instead of 1 to 12. A 0 result means the individual is “terrified” and ends their turn entirely; this brings back echoes of Blood Bowl; a game that strongly informs the main strategy for boss battlers with the core principles that if something could end your turn, you leave it as late as possible in your order of operations.

Armor

Armor is where you get your armor points from (surprise!), you only have armor on the locations listed by your card; so this Iron Lion Belt covers only the Body, but it gives three points! Some armor also gives extra abilities or temporary stat bonuses. It's simple, but importantly it has its own slot so you're not forced to choose between armor or something else.

Accessories

Last of all; we have an accessory slot; what these offer varies a great deal between the four classes; providing things like attunement, statistical bonuses or synergies with weapons. What we see in the demonstration is gaining attunement with sufficient Insight, an extra weapon that can add speed or be thrown and recovered and extra armor. So early days, and time will tell us more.

Character Sheet

In addition to your dashboard you also have a character sheet, this is a pad where you track various elements of your individual character including permanent stats alongside temporary ones gained from gear. It is also here one will record armor points while also tracking damage. When a character is hit you'll roll location dice and record the damage to the hit locations, as you can see each area has three points of damage it can take, once it is at that limit you will instead start drawing injury cards which can have a range of different effects. This should be a somewhat familiar design for veterans of KDM; though it has been turned to a new use.

The game's dice; there are no mechanical differences between the white and black D11s; the damage dice are customised as is the location dice. The four decks you see below are the injury decks; to be drawn from when all your HP for a location has  been exhausted and then you receive damage.

Non-Player Characters (NPCs)

Sometimes you'll even find other characters in the dungeons and be able to take control of them during the NPC Phase; they are simplified characters who can take a lot less punishment than your units, but they are not used as fodder and survive the dungeon there can be extra benefits gained from them.

You can see the NPC card pictured above; I found it immediately self explanatory as it uses the same mechanics as the normal characters in a simpler form. They can take a couple of hits depending on where the damage lands, but if they run out of HP on a location the next hit there will kill them outright.

Exploration

During this portion of the game; players will take it in turns to move, investigate rooms, undertake challenges, make decisions and eventually combat adversaries. You start out with nothing other than a hallway filled with doors and an objective to complete before you can face the boss. In the case of the demo we are looking for a friend who has gotten lost in the Foresaken Ward.

When there are no enemies on the board No Exit has a “Tactical Phase” which is a step where players can freely move around the explored area and trade items if they need to. I like this decision, because when you are in a dungeon crawl and there are no enemies or any kind of timer; having the players move in strict turn order with their fixed movement is honestly just busy work and not needed.

However, there is still a strict turn sequence when it is needed; and it is as follows:

The turn structure for the player phase is very fluid; players have the following things they can do and you'll notice that you do not even have to do everything before someone else can act. One player can move; another can then investigate and then a third could activate an item for example. It's a super interesting way of breaking things up that does slightly increase mental load for the players at the pay off of letting some really powerful tactical options open up. 

Investigate is the action of opening a door (the gold bars on the hallway), entering the first space of the room and drawing the relevant room card.

A room looks like this:

The Room card is double sided and the front looks like this:

We can see in the top right corner that the steps you follow with this card are clearly laid out. Read the card, make a choice, then flip the card and resolve it. I'll leave the back of this card unrevealed so you can find out yourself while playing the demo. I like the look of these cards and how clear the layout is, there's colour coordination to help you understand what is the consequences of your decision and just enough text to convey the scene without falling into story circle reading.

Some rooms however will come with not just choices, but enemies; what exact enemies they are will sometimes depend on the decision you made, I'm going to spoiler just the deployment and stats portion of the enemies in the demo so I can explain how this works.

What we can see here is the adversary type, some keywords, their Hit Points, where they are deployed (they can be in the light red or blue spaces depending if you chose blue or red options), the spot where the investigating character is placed (Dark red), their statistics (Difficulty to hit/How Many Dice they roll when attacking/The rolls that result in a hit/how much damage each hit deals). We also see how they move, who they move towards and what targets they choose when attacking. About the only awkward bit here is tracking the damage on the adversaries when they are on the board. That's just something that happens in most dungeon crawling games though, either you have health tokens next to/on the miniatures as they are damaged or you have a health tracking card like Gloomhaven.

It is also worth mentioning here that there are two colours for HP; red means normal bog-standard hit them with a stick and they bleed foes, while adversaries with purple HP are only vulnerable to certain types of attack. We get a taster in this demo of one purple adversary and this system of having some enemies require specific damage has a lot of potential to be interesting as long as players who cannot wound a given adversary have space to progress the game state in a supporting or crowd control manner.

One can consider this entire exploration section as a replacement for the 'hunt phase' in KDM, as it serves a similar purpose of providing potential attrition against the players units ahead of the boss fight, it's just far more engaging and has more decisions. You will move through this turn cycle of exploring, making decisions and fighting simple enemies (or running away from them!) until you have completed your objective(s) and are ready to face the boss. Needless to say, this is better than KDM's hunt phase by a long margin.

Boss Combat

Here's the boss board from the demo; what you'll notice straight away is that this boss has multiple hit location decks, each with their own target number and spaces where you can attack it. The decayed face can only be struck when you are attacking through the two front spaces right before it (I write “through” to cover ranged weapons). The Twisted Torso can be struck from the front and back, not direct sides and the Spectral Form plus Wretched Hand can both be hit from anywhere.

You'll also notice a little red box that says 'Critical Wound' at the bottom of each pile. If you get all the way through every single hit location card (they archive when you achieve various different conditions on them, the most common of which is wounding the card) then you can hit that bottom card for a big old bonus. It's a neat little system that I like a lot; you're encouraged to concentrate attacks on a certain portion of the boss and you can guess that the harder to hit locations may be more rewarding. I honestly adore the way that this game makes where you are attacking the boss from matter for the location you hit. Monster Hunter World the Board Game has a similar system and it is great there also. Bosses have HP in a similar nature to the adversaries, however they have a lot more points and sometimes there may even be other ways to kill the boss outright. There was some really neat and fun mechanics inside these hit location decks and I absolutely recommend you have a go playing against the Bastol a bit so you can see some of the potential design tricks this game has up its many sleeves.

On the offence side for the boss you can see that they have a deck of cards; a set “strategic attack” cards and a “triggered attack”. The attacks also have a tier ranking to demonstrate how dangerous they are and this brings me to an area where this system could be improved. I would prefer to gets some information on the backs of these cards so there is a little strategy behind figuring out the bosses behaviour. Print that tier icon on the backs of the cards please! (I have fed this suggestion back to Mack directly and he was receptive, which is great because information on the backs of boss battling AI cards is one of the most significant improvements later boss battlers have made over KDM's system).

Overall the core systems of this boss battling system are well designed; but the arena itself needs a little work; at the moment it is a bit too small and the demo boss doesn't make much use of the space, nor is there any terrain to add tactical options for both the players and the automated opponent. But these are all things that just require extra development, the proof of concept works and as long as we get sufficient variation in bosses and mini-bosses to avoid us being forced to fight the same three monsters over and over (you know what core game experience does that) this is going to be a great experience because I like the unique wrinkles and variations on the core boss battling and character mechanics we see here.

For the other elements of the game, including the narrative and house development aspects you will have to check out the kickstarter page because that is beyond the scope of the demo's elements. 

The Tryst Expansion

While No Exit aims to be a bit like Fire Emblem in some aspects via its romance; it is not afraid to lean heavily into more mature themes. There can be romance and more between characters; and the Tryst expansion allows for more adult orientated elements. You can read Mack's own statement on this at this link on BGG (https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3092791/anyone-else-bounce-because-nsfw-stuff). The short version is that this expansion is entirely optional, with all the mature and sexual content sequestered away in it and there is also a hard "no sexual violence" line taken by the designers.

We've seen content similar to this before in Dead of Winter, which went to some dark places (far more than the expressed intent of No Exit), so much so that those elements were also sealed away in an optional sealed envelope. In short, I think it is great that the game has a romance option, I think it's important that board games seek to explore relationships in the way that other media has already been accepted as doing. I also think it is important to allow people who are uncomfortable with this content to be able to avoid it. I also think it is great that this content is 'opt in' not 'opt out'.

Overall. it's a difficult decision for any board game designer to include content like this because it is inevitably going to draw controversy and criticism just as KDM's “sex organ” body horror and ATO's nymph nudity have also drawn criticism (which for the record I think is fair, you don't get to do things like that without it being criticised, it comes with the territory because of how normalised violence is over sex in media). So I think this decision here is a good one; as a form of interactive art & culture board games need to be able to , it's there for you if it is the kind of thing your group will enjoy. You can avoid this expansion if that kind of content is not for you.

Summary

I am backing No Exit for sure; this blend of Fire Emblem-esc houses combined with a new take on boss battling exploration, narrative decisions and some interesting twists to the boss mechanics means that I believe there is absolutely space for this game in the still expanding Boss Battling market. The team behind this are enthusiastic, open to feedback and for a first project this game is already looking very stylish and attractive. One does have to acknowledge that we do not know what the long term story and campaign mechanics are like at this stage; so that is a valid concern. It is also why I have to be a bit briefer than I would have liked; other previews I have had a chance to play included a mini-campaign section so I could experience the storytelling intent. However, the noises I have heard so far are looking very interesting and promising; with not only your house growing and developing over time, but apparently the Studium itself can get changed in some fashion through play. Legacy elements baked into a game from the start can pay off really well.

In addition I found the game to be familiar enough that I could pick up the mechanics quickly and I didn't find any elements of the rules portion to be hard to follow or problematic; it was a smooth and rapid experience to learn and get going.

I would urge you to at a minimum follow the project/back for a $1 and try out the demo if you have the right software; there's a lot to like here and the potential this experience has shown is something that I want to see grow to fruition. I've had great discussions with Mack, he's very humble and open to input/feedback which we can publicly see with the updates to the No Exit campaign; such as clearly stating the contents of the game (60+ unique sculpt minis, which more than comes in the core box for KDM – making this a very competitive deal even when you don't factor in how much more expensive making board games has become since 2016).

Also it uses D12s; the absolute Chad of all dice.

Additional Notes:

• At the time of writing this; news is to come on the miniature front in respect to material and similar, but I have been told the intended scale is 45mm which I am very happy about; boss battlers are spectacles with only a few units on the board at a time, there is no need for them to be small. Smaller miniatures look less interesting (except when there's loads of them) and they are harder to paint.
• There is also going to be an eye taken to revising the thinner elements of the sculpts with a goal of making sure they hold sufficient detail and translate to the physical medium in a high quality form.
• Mack has also confirmed that they're aiming to write the game's elements with an goal of being inclusive for LGBTQ+ people which is great because representation matters. Of course one can only review the intention here at this point; and obviously it is a good intention. Especially if it keeps away snowflakes who point to things like this and cry "woke" in fear.