Review | Solium Infernum - Mean Girl Simulator

Solium Infernum begins by having Belial, Prince of Lies, council you in the ways of Hell. As an Archfiend, you learn that Satan himself is absent, and it is both your duty and pleasure to take his place. In doing that, you’ll leave all who don’t see your cruel, domineering, and by all means psychotic ways behind or under you. At its core, Solium Infernum is a 4X(Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) strategy game that seeks not only to bring out the worst in you but rewards doing so. You’ll extort, enslave, steal, and lie, but unlike other similar games where you at least pretend to cooperate with those in your playgroup until the inevitable betrayal, the rules of the realm of the damned have no such qualms about showing their contempt for each other. As you commit unspeakable acts, you’ll gain Prestige as determined by the Infernal Conclave. This prestige can be used to further bully other Archfiends by demanding resources or increasing your status from a lowly Baron of Hell to a grand Prince or Princess of damnation. 

Past their shocking appearances, each Archfiend, has strengths and weaknesses.

While the tutorial, and the game in general, are rife with a demonic flavouring and atmosphere, actually playing it is another story. I’m all for diving into a game and figuring out how to get past pain points, but I did not feel equipped to navigate the single-player after the game’s short introduction. As you can imagine, as you become more successful, you develop a target on your back. The problem is, that the rival AI Archfiends will pounce on you as soon as you start to succeed. While the irony is not lost on me at a bunch of amoral people putting the ‘crabs in a barrel’ mentality into practice, it makes it hard to get anything done when 3 to 5 other players all immediately ask you for money under threat of invasion or duels to the death. 

This victory took me many tries and 36 hours of playtime.

Through innumerable tries, with 36.3 hours of playtime, I finally won my first scenario outside of the tutorial of Solium Infernum. 45.4 hours of playtime, I won my second. 51.1 hours, my third. I think this shows that while the game is fairly challenging, it's the onboarding that is lacking not the difficulty curve itself. All this was not helped by the fact that I could not find much guidance in the game or online. 

There’s more than one way to rule Hell.

I eventually discovered that Schemes let me build Prestige without angering my foes, but even then Schemes can be heavily influenced by RNG. The difference between needing to Insult 2 Archfiends or Capture 15 Cantons(things you can do very early in the game) and maxing out a Power tree(something you may not even get the chance to do over the course of a game), is vast. Accomplishing these Schemes can make the difference between having a chance at success or being bullied for the rest of the game by the lords of hell. 

Additionally, Chronicles(One-off single-player campaigns) are scripted somewhat, having an enemy Archfiend play an event that kills your only Legion(footsoldiers of the game), stops you from gathering resources, or restricts your Legions’ movements can be backbreaking to the point there was a good chance I’d start the Chronicle over. To be very clear, constant saving and save scumming is not just recommended, but necessary for your sanity.

This is the Encyclopaedia Infernum - it doesn’t have all the answers but you’ll need it!

This is made worse by the multiplayer population being very low (to be fair, there is an asynchronous mode so the online population may not be representative, but as of writing: 65 players are online with a 1,115 all-time peak on SteamDB). I tried to find a multiplayer game a number of times before someone informed me that actually I could just open a game in the lobby and wait for people to join. Not an ideal multiplayer experience, but I imagine this is the sort of game that you and a couple of friends would coordinate going in on, anyway.

Hell is very brown - whoever’s in charge should consider redecorating.

From a hardware point of view, the game is fairly resource-intensive, which I don’t really understand as most of the time you’re staring at a very brown screen. Certain innovations that have been in the RTS genre (if not the 4X genre) are absent here: scrolling speed is extremely slow, after every turn you’re forced to zoom back out, seeing the ‘ownership’ of various places and units is a pain, menus are glitchy and obtrusive, there is no ‘skip enemy turn’ option, the game speed cannot be adjusted, there is no way to hotkey an army, the notifications you receive range from extremely important to irrelevant and there’s no way to prioritize or hide them. Even trying to parse what other Archfiends have that isn’t already present on the battlefield is painful, but if you don’t, you could be punished by entering a losing battle which will relieve you of expensive and powerful Praetors (Commander Units), Artifacts, or Legions. 

One of the worst parts of the lack of common quality-of-life options is that there seems to be not just a few, but a lot of useless options. Whether that be Legions with only one movement (keep in mind moving takes an action slot which is a precious resource), legions that are laughably weak, or manuscripts that take too long to make. It just feels like a player is going to invest in these things and then get upset when they realize they wasted their in-game currency. 

While I’d be a little less judgemental if this was the game’s first entry, this is actually a remake of 2009’s game of the same name. Probably most damning is trying to do ANYTHING in this game uses an action slot. This mechanic is frustrating in turn-based RPGs, and it’s still unfun here in the 4X genre. I do understand as this is a multiplayer turn-based game the developer probably does not want someone doing too much at one time, but when the first 20 turns of a 50-turn game are simply unlocking a third action slot, I feel like the League of Geeks could let resource gathering be a free action, if not some other things. I can’t recommend this game over Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, which came out in 2002, and I’m sure there’s an entry in the Civilization, or Age of Mythology that plays better and respects your time more than this. 

One of the many nightmarish artifacts you can purchase, steal, or extort from other players.

While there are definitely plenty of fun and interesting parts to Solium Infernum; from choosing the right Archfiend and loadout, to poring over the lore and potential strategy you can take with the Encyclopaedia Infernum and its 5 Power trees, the pain points made me sigh in frustration more than look forward to my next session. While I really like the concept of a 4X game that puts Diplomacy first (even trying to kill off all your opponents takes much more effort than just deciding to go to war) and has such a unique theming and aesthetic, the actual gameplay needs to back that up. As League of Geeks just announced on 6/12/24 they’re pausing full-time development, I can only hope someday this game will be worth the hellish throne it aspires to.