Eldritch Lands: The Witch Queen's Eternal Warnote is a freeware Real-Time Strategy game by Arthur Cavalcanti released on December 23rd 2021.
In it, you follow Queen Sofia Nitshe, as she battles against the endless undead hordes of the Necroshroom Queen in a Dark Fantasy world.
The game can be downloaded from Steam for free here
Eldritch Lands: The Witch Queen's Eternal War contains examples of:
- Ambiguously Gay: Claymore, a homunculus of Sofia's old and close friend. Her dialogues particularly her fifth one, have her describing how awed she was at how Sofia looked in her dress, to the point of saying that she "found out how women should properly look and act" just by seeing her. However, the dialogue also implies that she felt her true calling was combat rather than a traditional "feminine life", and she never outright says anything to Sofia beyond that.
- Artificial Human: Homunculi, artificial bodies containing a memory imprint of a person. They prove quite handy due to being unable to be risen by the Necroshroom fungi.
- Big Bad: The Necroshroom Queen. Though due to the hive mind nature of the Necroshrooms, it's unclear if she is truly a leader or simply a representative.
- Crapsack World: Most races' Gods are dead or gone, three of the five kingdoms have died, and undead hordes swarm the lands with only one last bastion of safety, Soulspear Castle, remaining for humanity.
- Culture Chop Suey: The elves, they wield katanas and have Japanese first names, but have French last names, as seen in the two named elves in the game, Moriko Alarie and Akira Dubois.
- Expendable Clone: The basic concept of homunculi in general, Sofia can create them by the dozen, although making the basic template takes a bit more work. More literally, the Mage and Mana units are based on Sofia in the present and as a young girl, respectively.
- Fake Longevity: Unit dialogues are tied to the unit's level, and are unlocked at regular intervals. However, it's unlikely that the player will have every single unit in their roster at max level by the time they beat the final level, necessitating grinding the final level over and over to get the final dialogues. Downplayed, in that the player gets a huge pile of resources each time the final is cleared, and they have a chance to unlock a Purposely Overpowered unit to make it even easier.
- Glowing Eyes: Sofia's eyes glow purple, a sign of her crystal magic powers.
- God Is Dead: With the exception of the Elves' Godtree ,which Sofia questions the divinity of in the first place, every races' Gods are dead.
- Sofia killed the Empire Souls herself.
- The Deep Ones all died at one point after Sofia's past war with them, though she has no idea how or why.
- I Hate Past Me: When conversing with Mananote , Sofia finds her angsty, impulsive, and self-centered.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Sofia notes that the level 30 laser's paralysis attack is based on whether the target is facing the laser or not. She states that, as all of her units always face to the right, this shouldn't be a problem.
- Magikarp Power: Some of the units are rather underwhelming without their special level 30 mutations. The Laser is a mediocre ranged unit until it gets its slow at level 30, where it becomes one of the best crowd controllers in the game. The Slime is by far the biggest example though, it's the weakest unit in the game... until level 50, where it gains massive boosts in every stat, while retaining its fast recharge rate and cheap mana cost.
- Minor Major Character:
- Anastasia Nitshe, Sofia's daughter. She has an entry on the Lore screen, is the one the tutorial is being told to, is frequently mentioned on many of the game's flavor texts, and, according to Sofia, will be the one to truly bring peace and order to the world, but Anastasia has no speaking parts or any sort of direct role in the game's events. Justified as she is still a small child during the game's events.
- Moriko Alarie, Ruler of the elves, is an even more direct example. She also gets an entry on the Lore screen, and is one of the two rulers that hasn't been crushed under the necroshroom hordes, but doesn't do anything at all during the game's events and is only mentioned a handful of times outside of her lore entry.
- My Future Self and Me: Inverted when Sofia speaks with Mana, a homunculus based off of the memories of a younger version of herself.
- No Ending: Completing the final level awards a dialogue with the necroshroom itself... but that's it, the necroshrooms are still a problem and most of the mysteries are still open to be solved. The second necroshroom dialogue is just a developer message in which he thanks the player, and tells them to keep their eyes open for a sequel.
- Not Quite Dead: The fifth and final dialogue with Mage pretty plainly states that the Empire Souls, which Sofia killed in the backstory, will return sometime after her own death.
- Purposely Overpowered: Slimes, when upgraded to level 50, become comically overpowered, retaining their cheap cost and fast refresh time, but becoming super fast, super durable, and hitting like trucks. However, it requires a lot of resources to get a unit to level 50, and by the time the player can reasonably do this, it will likely be at or near the last level anyway. Thus level 50 slimes mainly serve to make it easy to grind the remaining resources needed to unlock the last dialogues of the game.
- Sequel Hook: Most of the game's questions and mysteries note remain unanswered both in the final canon dialogue with the necroshroom itself, and in unit dialogues.
- Shadowed Face, Glowing Eyes: The upper part of Sofia's face is usually covered in shade, the exceptions being when she is in complete private in places like her bedroom or storage room. This is fitting for her, with her shadowy motives, and questionable personal thoughts being hard to read.
- Vague Hit Points: Both enemy units and your homunculi can take a set amount of damage, but both the amount of damage they can take and how much damage attacks deal is never revealed to the player outright.
- We Have Reserves: Both Sofia AND the Necroshroom Queen have, in effect, near infinite forces. Sofia can always just create more homunculi, whose essence can be reused with no depletion if they die, while the Necroshroom Queen has centuries if not millennia worth of corpses to raise, not even counting any unfortunate travelers or wanderers who are killed by her forces.
