Wielders of the Essence: the Songs of Conquest team comes back with eight-minute runs

A studio that spent years making a demanding turn-based strategy game, then announces a bullet heaven, always triggers the same suspicion. Taking the easy road. A stopgap. The little thing you ship to keep the lights on.

Then you look at the screenshots, and you recognise every pixel.

The same world, seen from below

Wielders of the Essence reuses the setting, the creatures and the look of Songs of Conquest, the strategy game Lavapotion released in 2024 with Coffee Stain. The sprites come from the same hand, and they remain some of the finest pixels on the market.

Except you no longer command armies on a map: you play a Wielder, you cast spells, you drag a few troops along behind you, and you survive waves. Six Wielders to find and free, each with their own playstyle. The first one shown has a frog's head, which is already a statement of intent.

Eight minutes a run, eight hours to finish

The studio states the format plainly: eight-minute runs, and somewhere around eight hours to see the game through.

Between runs you go home. That is the incremental half, and the studio's phrasing is nice: taking your town "from puddle to paradise". Every building you put up unlocks something concrete, a troop, a stronger spell, a skill you did not have. The screenshots show a town of stilts and colourful towers, and an upgrade screen that states exactly what you are buying: Arcane Spear, projectiles 1 to 2, cost 2,000 gold and 15 units of a resource.

That transparency is a good sign. Failed incremental games are the ones where you spend without understanding what changes.

What will need checking

The genre is saturated, and for three years the question has not been whether it feels good for twenty minutes: nearly all of them do. The question is what changes between run 5 and run 30.

The game's two answers there are the six Wielders with different styles and the modes unlocked by finishing the campaign. The rest will depend on how varied the zones and bosses really are, and how fast the town saturates.

One detail does reassure me: the combat screenshots show very readable battlefields despite the density, with enemies identifiable one by one and damage numbers laid out cleanly. In a genre where the screen often ends up as luminous soup, that is strategy-studio craft showing through.

Out today, 5 November, on PC, developed by Lavapotion and published with Coffee Stain Publishing. A demo is available on the Steam page.

For anyone who was mainly waiting on more Songs of Conquest: come and say on the InsertCoins Discord whether this detour is acceptable. The argument is open.