First I have been a fan of all the games that Bedlam takes inspiration from: FTL, X-com, Fallout, Banner Saga. People either hate Bedlam (mostly for its out-of-balance difficulty) or love it. Unfortunately, there are more who hate it then love it. I like hard games, tactical games, rogue-likes etc. and never play on easy. But after my first game I was scouring the internet for guides on how to play this game. When you lose a game of Bedlam it happens slowly and is often irreversible. There is very little info out there on how to play and most of what is out there applies to the original, not Redux which changed a ton of the core mechanics. I'm on my 4th play through and I think I am going to make it Aztec City this time. I have three of the four relics, and a total of maybe 10 hours in the game including three failed attempts where I thought it was impossible to win. Important things: Your characters are not the protagonist. The Dozer is the main character, and you will need to use Dozer weapons and/or Equalizers to win every combat by mid game. You will need 8-12 veterans. Elites are helpful, but not needed. You need to upgrade your Dozer early in the game to level 4 or 5 for each category to succeed. You need to do a lot of side quests in order to get enough resources, Equalizers, and Dozer weapons to survive. If a combat is going very poorly, quit the game, and you will restart just before the combat (important if you make a horrible mistake and don't want to start a new game). It will be very tense with resources in the yellow/red zone and wounded soldiers for 2/3 of the game (Bedlam threat level). You are forced to use different strategies in each combat! You can go back to previously visited locations without risk, and often new side quests spawn that give you a chance to recover some resources. Fun game, it's balanced so that you'll be on the edge of disaster for most of the game, good luck if you try!
I held off on buying this game for a long time due to mixed reviews here, and elsewhere on the internet. But I am very glad I did get it. The game is short, has some very good level design and simple side-scroller action. There are only a few weapons and items, minimal crafting and some mostly forgettable mini-games. But the music, art and pacing are all excellent, and the game length, although short at about 5 hours, was perfect for keeping me engaged. The high quality design of a lot of different minimal game features made a game that was very enjoyable for me. But the best part for me was the story that is told in bits and pieces. A lot of the criticism for this game that I read was that it was very short, did a poor job of explaining what was going on, and has no replay ability due to set level design. For me, I now realize that a lot the questions I have about the plot are actually scattered all over the game and that I didn't pay enough attention to them.... so now I want to play the whole thing again. I feel that the first time you play this game it is an action side-scroller shooter, and the second time it is going to be a text based puzzle. I do feel that there is room for improvement, I feel that there were some missed opportunities to utilize the environments more, and that some additional background on the world could have added to the game, but all in all it is a fun sidescroller and a fun conspiracy/mystery story.
