Circus Electrique: A Steampunk Strategy Sim Inspired by Darkest Dungeon

According to its own introduction, the 1868 dime store novel The Steam Man of the Prairies is the first American sci-fi pulp novel. Its main character, a disfigured 15 year old boy, creates a mechanical man and takes it on a series of adventures in what is also considered the first “Edisonade,” a genre of “genius inventor” story named for Thomas Edison, who was 21 and not yet an inventor when the novel was published.
Circus Electrique, which takes The Steam Man of the Prairies as one of its inspirations, is its own kind of Edisonade, though its story is more interested in where innovation and technology go horribly wrong. It is an upcoming RPG and management sim hybrid set in a steampunk version of London, where rival circuses fight for supremacy while a more nefarious plot brews in the background. Developers Zen Studios were inspired by Darkest Dungeon, an ultra-difficult RPG focused on party placement where your characters can acquire permanent negative status effects. They aimed to make Circus Electrique more accessible in terms of its difficulty, as well as set it in a non-fantasy setting.
The game is set in Victorian London, in a universe that diverged from ours when the Spark, an electrical accident, made a crowd of people go insane and turned everyday citizens into vicious monsters. The game’s antagonist, an entrepreneur and rival circus leader called Eli Edwards, has established his company STEEM as a cornerstone of the London economy, and is trying his best to put the titular Circus Electrique out of business while also advancing his mysterious goals. The narrator is a journalist who decides to investigate and report on Edwards after an accident where a mechanical man he’s made goes haywire. Working with her uncle, who runs the Circus Electrique, she assembles a team of performers to fight against the rival circus.
Play primarily involves working your way through six neighborhoods of London to solve the mystery of Edwards’ intentions. The combat map in Circus Electrique is laid out much like the map in Slay the Spire, a series of nodes you move through that have battles, events, or treasure chests. Each map is based on a district in this alternate London, and I played through Southwark, the first and only map in the demo Zen Studios provided.
Combat is where comparisons to Darkest Dungeon really come though. There are up to four characters in a line on each side, each of whom has a preferred position. Like in Darkest Dungeon, movement is a key element of combat. Enemies can move your characters from key positions into unfavorable ones where they can’t perform certain moves, and you can do the same to them. There is no MP cost for casting spells or acting; you just perform one action per turn. Instead, you have a morale system called Devotion, which determines a character’s effectiveness when fighting. High Devotion gives you higher damage, while low Devotion makes characters likely to flee. The same is true for your enemies; you can make them flee by reducing their Devotion to zero. I found myself going for health damage almost every time, but I can see where Devotion damage will be essential against harder enemies.