Games you may wanna try: Lapse, A Forgotten Future

At the end of last year, Nerial released the sequel to Reigns, their hit mobile game which combines resource management and Tinder. Reigns : Her Majesty has been met with much praise for the improvements over the previous game.

But in mid 2017 Lapse: A Forgotten Future was released on the Google Play Store. The game's designer, Cornago Stefano has only made 2 smaller apps before the success of Lapse. It's design is similar to Reigns in many ways but Lapse has a couple of key differences which make the game unique.

For one, it is currently free to play on mobile. Though there are advertisements which appear between the "cards", these games' main gameplay element. These can however be taken away permanently with one easy payment of 1.29€.

One game, multiple themes

Lapse : A Forgotten Future is similar to Reigns in the way it is played. The characters you interact with who are unlocked progressively present their problems to you, the player, the leader of a nation of some sort. There are 4 resources to keep track of, environment, population, military and economy, they increase and decrease according to your decisions. If one of these needs is over or under a certain limit, your character dies and you must start over again.

The game does retain permanent progression such as in Rogue-likes which saves all the unlocks you may have activated during your game.

It this respect, Lapse doesn't change the formula much, a character appears, you choose A or B, the values increase or decrease and you hope your decision will give you the right long term benefits.

Left : Lapse, just a color swap away Right : Reigns

What Lapse does differently is in the narrative and the theme it presents itself with. Reigns is strange, funny, medieval fantasy while Lapse has a much darker tone. It's post apocalyptic science fiction where the world has been devastated and an epidemic is spreading throughout the population.

The creator of the game even found a way to justify narratively the looping repetitive nature of the gameplay. Where Reigns talks about deals with the devil and mysterious figures, Lapse uses time travelling, as the title of the game indicates.

If, like I me, you are a fan of Reigns, you owe it to yourself to try this game. It is free although you can throw money to the creator if you so desire. Lapse doesn't rip off anything because it has a unique take on this "Tinder-RPG" genre.