A new tactical RPG just caught the attention of strategy game fans everywhere. Lost Lake Games and publisher Hooded Horse announced Vaunted at the Xbox Partner Preview, and the core concept is genuinely interesting: what happens to your story when one of your teammates dies?
The premise is straightforward enough. You play as three scrappy mercenaries named Dyse, Gendril, and Kyvaath. They're sent on a treasure-hunting expedition across a space-opera galaxy to grab ancient relics for an angry employer. Things go wrong. Now they need to blast their way through aliens, robots, and rival hunters to complete the job before their benefactor loses patience.
Where Vaunted gets creative is in how it handles the story. The three protagonists each have their own version of what happened, and your dialogue choices shape which account becomes accepted history. But there's a twist that reframes the entire narrative structure: if you let one of your main characters die during combat, you get to replay that chapter from a surviving character's perspective. This unlocks different conversations, new loot, unique skills, and secrets that wouldn't exist otherwise.
This is a deliberate design choice that pushes back against the invincibility you often feel in RPGs. Normally, death is punishment to be avoided. Here, death becomes a narrative tool. Lose your thief, and the mercenary's version of events paints a very different picture. It creates actual stakes in a way that feels less about mechanical punishment and more about storytelling discovery.
The combat itself borrows from proven sources. Vaunted pairs turn-based planning with real-time action in the style of Sega's Valkyria Chronicles series. You don't get traditional initiative-based turns. Instead, you choose who attacks when, though you must alternate with enemy actions. During your turn, you leap into cover, aim precisely, and use physics-based interactions. It's tactical strategy meets third-person shooter, which means you can't just plan brilliantly and go make a cup of tea; you still need reflexes.
The development team matters here. Lost Lake Games is led by James Phinney, a designer who worked on StarCraft and both Guild Wars games. Those are some of the smartest strategy games ever made, so there's real pedigree in the team's hands. Hooded Horse, the publisher, specialises in deep tactical games like Manor Lords and Against the Storm, so this isn't a frivolous pairing.
You'll need to build out your squad properly to survive. Skill trees, randomised upgrades, and loadout swaps all matter. Your three main characters play different roles, and you can recruit additional companions to round out your roster. It's the kind of system that rewards both careful planning and experimentation.
Vaunted launches into Early Access in 2026 across PC. It's coming to Steam, the Epic Games Store, and the Microsoft Store, with day-one availability on PC Game Pass. That's a significant commitment from Microsoft, signalling confidence in the game's appeal to strategy fans.
The single genuine question is execution. The concept is strong; the team's credentials are solid. But blending real-time action with tactical depth is notoriously difficult to balance. Too much real-time, and casual players feel outgunned. Too much pause-and-plan, and action players tune out. Lost Lake's experience should help here, but the proof will be in the hands-on experience when the game launches.