I have been deep in Star Wars Zero Company, mostly because it keeps feeding the Clone Wars arc I already loved. I was sure Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave would be the game that finally pried me off it. I was wrong.
The tactics game that stole the hours is Ex Sanguis, from Lightbulb Crew. Anyone who played Othercide should have seen this coming. That 2020 debut is still one of my favorite games from that year. Ex Sanguis is not a direct sequel. It feels like the same brain, running hotter.
Zero Company was supposed to eat the calendar
Clone Wars tactics on a big license will get you through a lot of evenings. Zero Company does. I like how it builds on a story arc I already knew. The problem is a second tactics game arriving in the same window with a different kind of gravity. Fortune's Weave has the Nintendo machine behind it and a first hour people cannot stop arguing about. I still closed it to play Ex Sanguis again.
That is not a score. It is a calendar fact. Hours are finite. When a smaller studio's follow-up instinct beats two louder campaigns, the follow-up instinct is the news.
GameSpot's column made the same confession, and I am making it too. If you have been bouncing between Fortune's Weave and Zero Company this month and wondering why a third grid is even in the conversation, that is why.
Othercide stuck because of a simple grayscale field slashed with crimson, a party of elegant women, and turn-based fights that pop when you start chaining events. Ex Sanguis keeps those fingerprints. Mean. Stylish. Very good at making one more encounter sound reasonable. It plays like more Othercide the way Silksong felt like more Hollow Knight, or Spider-Man 2 felt like more of Insomniac's last swing. I did not plan to make room. I made room anyway.
Who this is actually for
If you bounced off Othercide's difficulty or its grim fashion-horror tone, skip this. Lightbulb Crew did not suddenly become Nintendo. If you finished Othercide and wished it had another campaign with the same camera, this is the purchase. Chain events are the toy. Fire Emblem wants you to babysit a grid of relationships. Zero Company wants you to babysit a Clone Wars story you already like. Ex Sanguis wants you a little meaner than either of those maps, and it rewards you for triggering chains until the board collapses. The party is still elegant and still in trouble.
I kept launching it after "one more encounter," which is how this studio got me in 2020. That is the whole review, compressed. The rest is whether you want a third tactics game in a month that already has two louder ones.
Practical bit: this is a tactics game you pick up because the last one from the same studio still lives in your head, not because a Direct sold you marble. Platforms and price were not in the notes we had, so I will not invent a store listing. Look it up next to Othercide in whatever storefront you used in 2020. If that page exists, you already know whether the art style is for you. The screenshot will tell you in one second. Grayscale. Crimson. No confusion.
Fortune's Weave's cold open is a genre trick. Ex Sanguis is a taste trick. One hides the sci-fi. The other dares you to want more blood on a black-and-white board. I know which one I will still be playing when the argument about Greece-versus-guns gets boring.
Big-budget teasers will keep arriving. Rockstar burying a radio sentence under an album post is how those studios hold attention without shipping. Announcement lists you scroll past are full of grids that will not stick. Ex Sanguis stuck. That is a higher compliment than a trailer.
Make room or don't. Do not wait for a year of tactics roundup.
I am not telling you to drop Fortune's Weave if the first hour hooked you. I am telling you the third game in the pile is the one I keep launching. One more encounter is a dangerous sentence in this genre. Lightbulb Crew knows that. They knew it in 2020. They still know it.
If Othercide never clicked, you will not be converted by a cousin. If it did, you already lost the evening. Buy Ex Sanguis before the month's louder tactics games convince you that you only have room for licensed Star Wars and Nintendo. You have room. I made it without planning to.