Power Well Origins first look – Puzzle duels!

Let me set the scene.  GamingTrend’s Origins interview booth was set up in the back-right corner of the convention.  About 5 spaces away from us was a booth with inviting pastel colors from a brand new team with a little gem of a game called Power Well.

On a whim, I stop by. They tell me the premise: “Think Puzzle Quest meets Dice Throne”.  “Sold!” I tell them. They’re not selling. Not yet, anyways. But they do have a prototype, and what a lovely prototype it is. After playing that prototype, I grabbed Nick Dubs, and we played again.  Then I grabbed Mike Dunn, and played again.  Over the rest of Origins, nearly our entire away team played it at some point, and very much loved the demo.

The premise is spot on. You have a shared pool of orbs, the titular Power Well.  Each turn you can take orbs from this pool of 1, 2, or 4 connected colors. This decides which power you get to use on your character’s power list, and after picking them out, new ones drop from the cardboard hopper with little fuss. However, only the two rows closest to you are available for use, with the middle row being shared by both players. Carefully choosing your orbs while also preventing the opponent from getting good picks is the core of the game, with the unique character abilities being the engine pushing it forward.

Each character is themed so that red orbs tend to hit hard, blue  orbs tend towards avoiding damage, and yellow orbs manipulate and set up for bigger turns down the line.  As an example, the character I played, the half-woman-half-animal Beasthunter, is able to use blue orbs to become Evasive to avoid devastating attacks while loading her crossbow, use yellow orbs to set up traps while also loading her crossbow, and use red orbs to unleash those loaded crossbow bolts to devastating effect.

The Painter, on the other hand, used blue to heal, red to deal damage, and yellow to completely control what combos the other player had access to. The Knight uses their shield to protect their marbles from manipulation, as well as reduce damage, while using a sword to punish their opponent for grabbing the shared marbles in the center. He then takes time to set up and deal devastating slashes with his greatsword stance, or oppressive shield bashes with his tower shield stance, being able to boost abilities or heal with a lootable potion.

Power Well’s bundle of interesting tricks aren’t over yet, though.  Each of your ability colors has a separate health bar.  When one is knocked out, it prevents those abilities from being used for a short time, which can be critical to avoid getting hit with a big ability your opponent would otherwise be set up for. Each player also has 4 coins that get dropped into the Power Well to survive such an ordeal (think putting quarters in to gain continues in an arcade). Once knocked out, orbs of the knocked out ability can be used to bridge the gap between colors, allowing for combos that might have been impossible before.  What’s more, using these bridges also heals that ability bar to bring it back online.

There’s a risk in being in this vulnerable state, however.  Each health bar you’re missing when you lose another increases how many coins it costs to stay in the game when you lose one.  If you are already down 1 health bar, not only do you lose 1 coin for losing the first health bar, but the second one to go down loses 2 more coins!  So getting the ability bars back fast is imperative.

That’s also not mentioning the fighting-game-like Super Bar that can empower any of your existing abilities, or the fact that the team mentioned having a whopping 15 characters already designed and in testing, including a sword wielding samurai doggo!

I fell in love with the concept from the word go, and the execution is very promising even in prototype form. The team behind this, Red Planet Games, is a family affair, with brothers and sisters and other family all putting effort into making this game and their appearance at Origins happen. The result is one of the games that I’m most looking forward to and will be keeping an eye on from here on!  Don’t sleep on Power Well, folks!

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