‘Into the Breach’ Solved a Big Problem: How to Show Off Your Strategies

Open Thread is where Waypoint staff talk about games and other things we find interesting. This is where you’ll see us chat about games, music, movies, TV, and even sports, and welcome you to participate in the discussion.

A few days ago, deep into my obsession with tactical mech RPG Into the Breach, I got my first “four island” win, meaning that I’d managed to clear every available mission before tackling the game’s final challenge. I was pumped, not only because I’d won, but because of how I’d won.

Unlike Subset’s last game, FTL, which ended in an incredibly difficult but ultimately formulaic battle against a unique enemy mothership, Into the Breach concludes with back to back missions that are just… tough. It tosses some of the game’s tougher enemies at you, forces you to defend not only the normal power grid nodes but also a special anti-bug bomb, and fills the board, each turn with major environmental hazards. It doesn’t demand the same exact strategy each time, nor does it make certain builds unplayable. It just asks you to play consistently and play well.

I had not played well. I had been sloppy. I’d wasted my free reset, failed to clear the board of enemies quickly enough, and left one or two specifically troublesome foes with too much health to take down easily. I was one turn away and it seemed impossible. Then I did what I always do in situations like this: I stared at the screen for 20 minutes until a solution appeared. Victory.

It isn’t that I won that made the feeling so sweet. It was that the final turn of this very good run had turned into a perfect puzzle, specifically able to push my team to its limits. Enemy arrangement meant that my own weapons were being turned against me. The Vek focus on my power nodes meant that I needed to find the perfect blend of offense and defense. And the damn bomb was totally trapped. It was such a good puzzle that, after winning, I challenged my Twitter followers to solve it (before sharing my own solution later in the thread).

Take a look:

Okay… there’s a lot going on here, I know. Even if you’ve been playing as much Into the Breach as I have, there’s a lot to unpack. In fact, one of the things I loved to see on Twitter (beyond the attempts to solve the fight in new ways) was the sheer number of ways people were describing what steps they’d take.

Which brings me to my favorite thing to happen in the growing Into the Breach fandom: Notation.

As soon as people started streaming Into the Breach, it became clear that conversations between players and their audiences needed a linguistic glue to hold conversations together. “I”m going to rocket punch that bug” and “What if you electro-whip the purple one” just doesn’t cut it when you’re trying to save the world. One fan built a Twitch overlay that gave the game screen a chess-like grid, and within a day or two, Subset had incorporated the same idea into the game directly as an optional on-screen effect. (Check the header image if you’re curious).

But it hasn’t stopped with Twitch chat. I’ve begun to see people use chess-like notation in Tweets and chat conversations, and one fan has even put together a really impressive system of algebraic notation that accounts for everything from killed bugs and shields to status effects and pilot abilities. It’s a complex game after all, dense with information that has to be conveyed properly if we’re going to be able to dig into the fun of exchanging solutions.

My hope is that this is only the start for Into the Breach‘s community-driven notation and collaboration. You know how they print chess puzzles in the paper? (They do that, trust me). I want that but for Into the Breach. I want players designing devious challenges for each other. I want Subset to add a daily challenge mode focused on a single turn of play. Please, world, give me even more ways for this beautiful mech game to takeover my brain.

So, for today’s Open Thread question, I wanna know: Have you ever gotten deep enough into a game to learn a special language of notation? Whether that’s as simple as shorthand for abilities in your MMO character’s rotation or as complex as joystick and button sequences in the world of fighting games, let me know over in the forums!