Going Rogue: Fights in Tight Spaces
Hey, remember spy movies? Remember how they used to be fun? Remember how James Bond used to be a debonair rake in a tuxedo and not a grizzled antihero?
Okay, I can’t get carried away talking about movies. This is not a film analysis column, this is a roguelike analysis column. Movies may get worse before they get better. But as for games, there is one game carrying the torch for the cool spy genre, and that is Fights in Tight Spaces.
The Game
In Fights in Tight Spaces, you play a secret agent being dropped into various lightly-scripted, but mainly procedurally-generated, scenarios that need to be resolved with a little light ass-kicking. Various moves let you attack or maneuver to a better position (such as, say, adjacent to a convenient railing); playing multiple attacks in a row creates combos that boost your damage.
The aesthetics are impeccable: Stylish two-color silhouettes in minimalist environments. The 3D rigging and animation here is top-notch, with lots of nice floppy ragdolls and bespoke attack animations that interact so seamlessly with different enemies and environments that you’ll be going “Are you sure this isn’t rotoscoped video?”
Runs are five mini-campaigns adding up to a couple of solid hours, so don’t go trying to sneak one run in when your boss looks away.
Also, I am extremely good at it.
Simple Math: A
My ideal of a simple math game is the sort of thing like Iris and the Giant where the lowest-level characters have 1 damage and 1 health. By comparison, the hit points in Fights in Tight Spaces are edging towards awkwardly big — “62–16” is certainly within mental math range, but not within “math I can do at a glance without thinking for a sec” range.
But the power scaling in Fights in Tight Spaces is modest, and hit points always stay comfortably below 100. An even bigger plus: There are blessedly few status effects, especially not ones that stack in complicated ways. So, ultimately, there’s nothing you can’t work out with a second or two of thought — and you’ll need to.
Deterministic Outcomes: A
With 50 or so hit points and enemies who can deal 10 damage a hit, combat can be rough, and block can’t soak it all. The best way to survive: Don’t get hit.
Thus, knowing precisely what your enemies are going to do is an essential part of the strategy. Fights in Tight Spaces provides copious information for you to work with — not only how much damage they do but how the characters move, whether they currently have a target, and so on.
Figuring out how to use that information to your advantage — for instance, by making a pair of mooks accidentally shoot each other — is, of course, the crux of the challenge.
Tradeoffs: C
Making use of the arena and your cards to make the best move can require careful thought. However, once you’ve done the math, ultimately there’s not really much ambiguity as to what the best move is — there aren’t all that many different possible strategies.
To be sure, there are some, primarily whether to whittle down enemies or try to maneuver for a big move like a rail kill, and whether to pursue optional objectives. But it tends to be a turn-to-turn choice rather than an ongoing strategy.
Compared to other games we’ve looked at, there’s a lack of synergies here. Upgrades modestly improve your cards, but don’t fundamentally alter the way they work. Combo damage is linear, not exponential. This helps with balance, but also reduces the payoff. It’s almost always the right choice to take the shot when you have a chance rather than waiting for a better opportunity later.
Geometry: A
It’s not very often that a game puts one of my design pillars directly in the title.
I was slightly bearish about giving this game an A in geometry, simply because it’s a grid-based game, and it’s real tough to execute those without the gameplay becoming tedious and inefficient. But Fights in Tight Spaces pulls it off tidily. How?
First, of course, there’s the arena. As small as 5x2, they’re cluttered with props that break up your movement and create interaction. It’s rare that you spend a turn without a convenient wall, counter, or glass door to smash someone into.
Second, enemy intents are locked in at the beginning of your turn. As opposed to RPG-style combat where an enemy can always attack you when you’re in range, these enemies have facing and can only attack what’s directly in front of them. Your targets also face restrictions. This creates a complex matrix of squares targeted by different numbers of enemies, which you must navigate with an extremely limited moveset. It’s rare for any two spots in the arena to have the same outcome.
Turn-based games of all kinds could do well to learn from this structure. I, for one, would be happy to never play another DnD fight in an empty 30-foot room.
Overall Grade: A-
Especially on a first playthrough, Fights in Tight Spaces blows you away with its tight crafting and stylish presentation. If you can put the game down when you’re this close to taking out the big boss, you have better self-control than me.
Metaprogression: Mostly Game
The holes at the elbows really only begin to show when you’ve beaten the game a couple of times and are looking for the next challenge. There’s a leveling mechanic and you unlock some extra decks, but while some of them are quite fun to play (I’m fond of Grappler myself), they really just provide a more specialized focus on one mechanic rather than introducing a new strategy.
Although the individual notes are procedurally generated, the broad beats of the campaign are always the same (including the same cutscenes — fear not, they’re skippable). Even the DLC, disappointingly, follows the same plot, just with some added characters.
In the long term, then, Fights in Tight Spaces is a joy and a delight at the start with a luster that wears off fairly quickly if you, like me, want a lot of novelty in your roguelikes.
Is it worth it overall? Oh yes. Hell yes. Emphatically yes.
As for our honorary award, there are plenty of roguelikes that look pretty, but I can’t name a single one with the at-a-glance recognizability of Fights in Tight Spaces — and I certainly can’t name another one where I wished I dressed as well as the protagonist.
Honorary Award: Best Style
Now excuse me, I have some ninjas to punch.
More Going Rogue
Tetra Tactics
Mortal Glory
Iris and the Giant
Fhtagn Simulator
Meteorfall: Krumit’s Quest
Monster Train
