There’s a fascinating inevitability at the heart of Massive Chalice. Time creeps inexorably forward, as you – the immortal monarch of an all-too-mortal country – command a squad of heroes to repel the ever-advancing corruption of the mysterious Cadence.

Ten, fifteen, twenty years pass between incursions, and your squad ages with little grace, their aptitudes and statistics shifting as time steals strength, hones intuition, drags them toward a grave no degree of tactical thinking can escape.

Your most valuable resources are measured in years, each decision weighed by the effects of those years on your chosen bloodlines. Do you retire your strongest hero at the height of his fecundity and lock him in a castle with his eugenically-chosen wife to breed the next generation? Can you spare a talented hunter for a twelve-year grail quest in which she may recover a powerful artefact, or end up dead in a ditch far from home?

Inevitably, he dies peacefully in his bed, her heroism fades from memory. Fifty, a hundred, two hundred years pass. What were their names, again?

No matter how thematically apt it may be, this winnowing of memory ultimately undermines Massive Chalice. It becomes increasingly difficult to care about the soldiers under your command when they’re so obviously ephemeral. By the time they’ve survived a battle or three it’s time to marry them off and focus on their younger siblings, their eventual death marked by little more than a request to assign a replacement. It’s disconcerting that the ideal response to the death of an honoured regent is to immediately install their infant great-grand-daughter on their throne, married to your most fertile twenty-four year old Caberjack. It brings into sharp focus that these heroes and regents and sages are merely pawns, representatives of important bloodlines but of little import in their own right.

And if it’s not the people you’re fighting for, what exactly is the point of the Chalice?