What happens when your muscle, your thief, and your mage are all lying jerks trying to rewrite a botched expedition to save their own skins? That’s the compellingly chaotic premise of Vaunted, an upcoming tactical RPG from Lost Lake Games. Developed by industry veteran James Phinney, Vaunted promises a blend of real-time adrenaline and turn-based tactics, wrapped in a narrative where the “official” history is a prize fought for with bullets and bluster. More than just a sci-fi shootout, the game elevates its stakes by tying its trio’s mortality directly to the story’s direction, ensuring every tactical decision and conversational choice has profound, lasting consequences. This article delves into the unique combat mechanics, the pivotal role of narrative choice, and how the threat of permanent loss promises a replayable, high-stakes experience.
The Core Cast: A Trio of “Morally Dubious” Mercs
The crew of the Vaunted consists of Dyse, Gendril, and Kyvaath. From a gameplay perspective, they fit the classic archetypes: a heavy, a thief, and a mage, providing a balanced tactical foundation. Their personalities, however, are far from heroic. They are described as “morally dubious alien treasure hunters” and “dicks,” brought together less by camaraderie and more by the shared need to placate an angry benefactor. Their interactions are framed by vaguely Mass Effect-style dialogue scenes, offering players three response choices that shape their relationships and, more importantly, their competing narratives.
Each mercenary has their own self-serving version of how their expedition went catastrophically wrong. Your choices throughout the game determine which of these skewed histories ultimately gets accepted as fact. This setup introduces a layer of narrative strategy seldom seen in tactical RPGs, where brown-nosing a character or undermining another carries tangible benefits that extend far beyond simple reputation points, directly influencing available skills, loot, and story secrets.
Hybrid Combat: Strategy Meets Real-Time Action
At its heart, Vaunted is a tactical combat game, drawing clear inspiration from Sega’s Valkyria Chronicles. The flow of battle is a deliberate hybrid: players engage in real-time action, firing weapons and dodging enemy attacks, all underpinned by turn-based planning that governs the overall pacing and resource management. This “turn-based planning and fight flow” system forces players to think strategically, positioning their squad and planning ability use while remaining reactive to enemy movements.
Victory demands more than quick reflexes. As noted in the development insights, players must constantly manage skills, upgrades, and gear, tailoring their loadouts to match their preferred tactical approach for each encounter. The system is deepened by the ability to recruit companion characters to fight alongside the core trio, allowing for further squad customization and strategic flexibility to overcome diverse enemy formations of aliens and robots.
Pre-Fight Preparation Is Non-Negotiable
The game makes it explicitly clear that preparing your squad pre-fight is a critical step. Neglecting this aspect—failing to update gear, allocate skill points, or consider enemy types—can lead to disastrous outcomes in the field. This emphasis on preparation reinforces the game’s tactical identity, positioning success as a reward for careful forethought rather than mere in-moment execution.
The Ultimate Stake: Permanently Fallen Mercenaries
Where Vaunted introduces its most daring mechanic is in its approach to character death. The developers confirm that if players mess up during battles or fail in their preparatory duties, any of the three main mercenaries can die permanently midway through the campaign. This is not a simple game over screen. Instead, their death becomes a narrative pivot point, offering “a chance to rewrite the current chapter from a different perspective.”
This consequence reshapes the entire experience. The loss of a core character—especially one whose narrative you’ve been championing—unlocks unique conversations, new loot opportunities, different skills, and hidden secrets that would otherwise remain inaccessible. Suddenly, the tactical stakes are exponentially higher; keeping your preferred liar alive isn’t just about maintaining party balance, but about preserving your chosen path through the story and accessing its associated rewards.
A Narrative Driven by Failure and Opportunism
The death-and-rewrite system cleverly inverts traditional failure states. Instead of reloading a save to avoid a death, players are encouraged to see it as a branching narrative opportunity. This design philosophically echoes the protagonists’ own opportunism: just as they seek to rewrite history for personal gain, the player is given the tools to rewrite the gameplay narrative through catastrophic loss. It provides a powerful impetus to protect your squad, while simultaneously making failure a fascinating and productive part of the game’s story ecosystem.
Depth Beyond the Core Loop: Loot, Skills, and Secrets
While the narrative consequences of choice and death form a compelling hook, Vaunted aims to satisfy dedicated tacticians with robust systemic depth. The RPG progression is multifaceted, involving constant evaluation of skill trees for each character, upgrading their weaponry and armor, and swapping gear to exploit enemy weaknesses. The loot acquired is presumably tied not just to statistical power but to the unfolding story, with certain items or abilities becoming available only when history is written a certain way.
The promise of unlocking “secrets” through alternate narrative paths suggests a level of world-building and hidden content that rewards experimentation and multiple playthroughs. Whether these secrets involve new areas, powerful boss encounters, or revelations about the benefactor and the botched expedition, they add weight to every dialogue choice and tactical decision.
Anticipated Release and Positioning in the Genre
Scheduled for a 2026 release, Vaunted carves out a distinctive niche. Its inspiration from space westerns and its focus on a gritty, self-interested crew invite surface comparisons to titles like Borderlands. However, its deep commitment to hybrid tactical combat and consequential narrative choices positions it closer to a “brainier” evolution of that formula, where loot and shooting are framed within a context of strategic survival and historical manipulation. The pedigree of Lost Lake Games, led by a designer with experience at Blizzard and ArenaNet, further signals an ambition to deliver a polished, systemically rich experience.
The impending journey of Dyse, Gendril, and Kyvaath is not one of redemption, but of ruthless, tactical survival where the spoils include the very truth of their past. With a release date set for 2026, the game is currently available to wishlist on Steam and the Epic Games Store, marking a title to watch for players who crave tactics with tangible narrative teeth.
Ultimately, Vaunted positions its combat not just as a series of challenges to overcome, but as the volatile engine of its storytelling. The ability for a mercenary to fall and for history to be rewritten from the resulting chaos ensures that no two campaigns will ever be truly alike, blending the permanence of tactical consequences with the mutable nature of self-serving myth. It is a game where protecting your narrative investment is as crucial as protecting your flank, making every shot fired and every lie told a step toward crafting your own version of a very dubious legend.
