Successor Brings Tactical Tabletop RPG Combat To Mixed Reality

Mixed reality is quickly becoming a medium where we’re seeing more tabletop-inspired strategy and RPG games popping up. With that in mind, I picked up my Quest 3 and went hands-on with Successor, which recently came to the Meta Horizon Store. Read on for my impressions.

After spending some time with Successor, I can already see the appeal in its tiny battles and the way it lets you manipulate a living slice of the game world across your play space. I’m normally not drawn to games in the strategy categories, but just like Banners & Bastions, this one delivers a satisfying sense of roguelite RPG snackability and an easier learning curve. You don’t feel like you’ll need to commit hours of your life to overseeing this tiny war, which takes place on a highly detailed augmented tabletop game board in front of you.

What makes Successor approachable is how quickly the basics fall into place. The learning curve feels surprisingly light, and once my party grew past two members, the tactical depth started kicking in a bit more. Every move demands increasing thoughtfulness, while the back-and-forth flow starts taking on the feel and familiar tension of some of my favorite classic 90s RPGs like the Final Fantasy series.

Map manipulation is another highlight. Being able to resize and reposition it on the fly keeps the action comfortable and focused regardless of where I’m sitting or standing while playing. Playing around with the map for me is part of the fun… Just shifting the world around, then resizing it, and leaning in to get a better vantage point while my tiny heroes did battle is a cool experience in itself.

Now, it’s not all smooth terrain on the journey through Successor. I hit a strange bug where the map suddenly becomes a blacked-out silhouette if I push it too far past the midpoint of my position in the room. Oddly enough, this bug doesn’t appear on camera, making it impossible for me to demonstrate it here; however, it’s distracting but not game-breaking since I can simply keep the play area confined to a set space. Performance also dipped a few times during larger encounters, with noticeable slowdowns while multiple actions were triggered at once.

Furthermore, aliasing is heavy in certain spots, noticeably on text. World map tags, in particular, are so jagged-looking to my aging eyes that they are sometimes unreadable. With everything else in the game popping off nicely against the mixed reality backdrop, seeing text like this is the sort of rough edge that just stands out more in mixed reality, where clarity is crucial.

Despite a few rough patches, the approachable mechanics with satisfying party-driven combat and mixed reality gameplay make it easy to recommend for fans of tabletop-style RPGs. The game already nails the fundamentals by providing tactical battles with an old-school RPG vibe. So with a bit more polish on performance, visual clarity for text, and the addition of more narrative depth, Successor could easily become a standout in the genre.

Successor is a game I’ll be keeping a closer eye on going forward, so look for updates here as they become available. If you’re ready to start your adventure now, you can grab a copy from the Meta Horizon Store here, and it’s also coming to PC VR at a later date.