The Prince of Darkness has vanished from Hell, leaving the Infernal Throne vacant and a vast power vacuum to fill. Who can step forth and claim the throne for themselves? Solium Infernum – a 2024 reimagining by League of Geeks – sees a menagerie of Archfiends sending out their legions to conquer the underworld, put forth plots and schemes to undermine their rivals and ultimately ascend to the throne.
Solium Infernum is a pretty simple game to grasp the basics, as you start off with a stronghold, some surrounding territory and a single legion. From there, any hex that your legion walks across is claimed as your territory, and you seek to build up your power base by capturing power trees to increase your influence.
Each turn, you can only issue a small number of commands, whether that’s a move, a call for tribute from your followers, and so on. Should your legion come into contact with an enemy, combat plays out through three stages, first with ranged, then melee and finally the arcane in turn.
However, there’s layers and layers beyond that. There’s protracted diplomatic plays, you can initiate Events, Rituals and cook up Schemes, all in an effort to further your aims. Many of them will play out across multiple turns as, for example, a diplomatic insult can see you challenged to a duel the next, the choosing of champions, and then a multi-round mini-game of attacks between your praetors until one wins out.
There’s eight Archfiends vying for the throne – though the game is for 1 to 6 players – from the Dragon Knight Astaroth, to the greedy gold-inlaid form of Mammon, or the insectoid new arrival Beelzebub. Where the original game gave you freedom to create whatever dark lord you wanted, League of Geeks has sought to strip away the complexity of simply getting into a game by creating these defined characters, each with particular traits and abilities – Mammon, for example, is able to claim discarded tribute, while Beelzebub can turn defeated legions into fleshy coins. Delightful.
However, there will still be plenty twists available to experienced players through the Reliquary, letting you chop and change a bunch of crowns, rings and other items to twist your build, similar to the amulets from League of Geeks’ previous game Armello. You’ll be able to explore some of these playing solo, with some narrative scenarios, but the game’s heart is in online play.
Solium Infernum is a grand strategy game that can take hours, days, weeks, months to play out. The turn-based strategy is build with asynchronicity in mind, with each player submitting their turns, and all of them playing out concurrently once the turn has ended. It’s a game where you just need to spend a few minutes to put in your turn, before quitting the game and getting on with the rest of your day. Alternatively, you can organise a session with friends and rattle through turn after turn in quick succession with a timer keeping the pace of a match together. Or, actually, this remake lets you do both.
The original Solium Infernum is a game from right on the cusp of the always online, always interconnected era that we now live in. First released by Cryptic Comet in 2009, its turn-based strategy was minimalist enough to allow player turns to be sent via email, calculated and played out, before a further turn was started. With emails as the backbone, it’s a necessarily quite rigid system.
Compared to those primitive internet foundations, League of Geeks’ remake leans on far more advanced systems, background servers and more to achieve the same goal with modern benefits and niceties. Key to this is how the game can seamlessly accommodate both sessional and asynchronous play in the same match. Regardless of the turn time that is defined, once all players have submitted their orders, the turn will be played out at that point. So even if a turn is set to take a day or a week, if you’ve got everyone playing at the same time, you can rattle through a dozen turns in quick succession.
Further to that, Solium Infernum hooks into the Steam backend to push notifications to you, both on PC and in mobile apps, if you have notifications enabled. It’s a fantastic change that can really keep a game rattling along, even if it’s one of those matches that’s due to last for a whole year. The game lets you keep a whole bunch of games on the go as well, if you want to sink more time in.
The one concern is that, where emails will probably never die and the original game can still be played by its fans, this remake will be tied to League of Geeks’ servers. As we see time and again, that often puts a ticking clock on an online game’s viability. However, we were assured that the server costs will be about as minimal as possible, with turns being submitted so infrequently and only consisting of a tiny amount of data. Hopefully, if the time comes, there’s a succession plan in place.
One resounding positive is the fantastic visual stylings that this game has now been lavished with. Looking at screenshots of the original, it looks more like a game from the mid-90s, rather than 2009, but League of Geeks has lavished it with a wonderfully dark and moody style. The landscape is a grey and ashy wasteland punctuated primarily with splashes of red, and this accented monochromatic colour scheme pervades the wider UI. It’s also stuffed with hundreds of stylish artworks for legions, praetors and beyond. It’s a great looking game.
The original Solium Infernum passed me by, but as I’ve now scratched the surface of this remake, I’m thoroughly enamoured with the tone and the ideas behind it. I’m planning to find a game or two and play more through this weekend’s playtest – it’s available now and through to Monday via Steam – and I’m certainly looking forward to the full game release on 14th February.
