Into the Breach

10/10

Released in 2018 by Subset Game. Not very spoiler-y.

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Into the Breach should be extremely boring—a tactics game where you know exactly what your opponent is going to do. However, that predictability is actually the center of its design loop. One can draw an obvious (imperfect) parallel between chess and Into the Breach; the beauty and difficulty of chess, in part, lies in predicting what your enemy will do. Into the Breach’s brilliant twist is telling you exactly what the enemy will do—but only next turn.

Into the Breach is fresh and brilliant primarily because it turns known enemy intent into something the player can manipulate, while preserving uncertainty beyond the next turn. The tension between one-turn certainty and future uncertainty structurally drives Into the Breach. You cannot condition on future information, even though that information will be revealed in full, one turn at a time.

The knowledge you gain from every run transfers between squads, but each squad changes which parts of that knowledge matter. Each squad forces you to see the board and its components in a different way, changing which aspects of the board become strategically salient. A different squad on the same map, with the same enemies, is a completely different round, as the exact same board is reinterpreted as a different set of obstacles and opportunities.

Having complete knowledge of the enemy’s next turn allows the game to drive difficulty through other means: actions are scarce; enemies can have strong and varied attacks; you have to minimize civilian casualties. Everything in Into the Breach is easy to see—the board is information-dense but visually clean, ensuring that seeing the future doesn’t blind you. The problem you face in Into the Breach is not knowing what the enemy will do, but what to do with that knowledge.

Into the Breach is hard precisely because you know what the enemy will do. You’ve paid in full for that information, though, or you will shortly.

And there’s nobody to blame but yourself.