Nanolith

Our heroes wake up in an unknown place. They feel the heat of the flames trying to consume them. A woman’s scream comes from behind the wall of fire and suddenly they are attacked by a gang of robots. What happened here anyway?

That’s what we’ll find out when we go on a cyberpunk adventure in Nanolith. In this futuristic dungeon crawler we will lead a group of 4 daredevils trying to regain their memories.

The gameplay will take place in two storybooks. Storybook will offer us an atmospheric introduction before each mission. We will also read the next paragraphs of our adventure in it.

In Encounterbook, we will lead numerous battles and delight in comic inserts that will further introduce us to this cyberpunk world.

Cyber climate

Nanolith has an amazing atmosphere. You can feel that it is cyberpunk in full force. We have hacking, futuristic equipment, implants, nano machines and some strange mix of flesh and steel. The city we’ll be moving around is also very atmospheric and hides a lot of secrets, which we’ll be discovering during the game.

In addition, the comic interludes are simply sensational. They show various situations from the lives of the characters and allow us to learn a little more about them. The life of our protagonists is also given by numerous dialogues, which we will be able to read before each mission. You can feel that THEY are the main plot, and are not just inserted into the story just to keep it rolling forward.

Nano hero

It’s time to introduce our heroes.

Ashitaka is a cyber samurai. He is not afraid to be in the center of a conflict, and solves all issues with his katana. He is the kind of tank who can charge and deal damage to several enemies at once. Currently, this is my favorite character.

Vaa-lith is an alien who throws his spear left and right. He acts a bit like such a sniper, who can inflict a lot of damage and also can attack several enemies at the same time. Only that from a far.

Ada is a typical healer. She heals our damage and helps increase the potential of our actions.

Cora is a hacker who uses her abilities to hack computers and enemies. She has a companion in the form of a cute little robo panda who can use the abilities of enemies after they are hacked.

Each of these heroes is quite sterotypical, but the cool thing is that we can develop them in several ways. By choosing different abilities, we can focus on a certain aspect of our cyberpunk. In addition, different abilities can be nano-enhanced by our companions. All they have to do is use up one of their action dice. Who can strengthen this ability will depend on the choices we make during our adventure. I love this kind of cooperative play.

We can develop our skills and weapons by adding additional stats and dice to them. This is a very interesting aspect of the game, but it has some downsides. However, I’ll mention that with the game components.

2 books, and one action

So how does this combination of two books or Storybook and Encountebook work? In short, phenomenally. Each book offers something different, but cohesively they form one story. In Encounterbook, we often walk around some locations and, just like in point & click games, we can click something to see what happens next. The best aspect of this is that some of the drawings have some kind of hidden puzzle. They may be numbers to a specific paragraph, for example. You have to take a good look at it all.

Boss fights all the time

Something that surprised me in Nanolith is that we are constantly being attacked by some unusual machines. These boss fights are really quite a lot. Each of them is also quite unique. Minor spoilers, but once I had to fight a mutant in a mech suit from Alien. This sucker had such hard armor that first I had to hack a few consoles to lower his total armor. Only then could I move on to dpsing. In the next mission I faced a nanoghost that teleported across the board. There was also a fight with a machine-human spider and geisha robots. The bosses give Nanolith just the sort of thing I really like in such games. Because they have their own unique mechanics, diversifying the gameplay for us. The clashes were interesting and each of them had such a cool flavor.

As for the usual enemies, I have only one minus. I mean how the reinforcements enter the map. Let’s assume that we kill all the henchmen. The worst thing is that at the end of the round they will appear again anyway. Because that’s how the mechanics of reinforcements work in Nanolith. We don’t get anything for killing them and constantly beating them over and over again gives such a boring feeling of Déjà vu. Because that’s how the mechanics of reinforcements…

At least I’m glad that the enemies are not another goblins, orcs, spiders and rats from under the tavern. They are interesting, unique and memorable. Especially all those combinations of human flesh and metal. Creepy AF.

Mechanical combat

While we’re on the subject of combat, it’s doubly dicey. First, at the beginning of the turn, we roll all the characters’ action dice. Our blue d6s determine what actions we can perform. Because in order to move, use weapons or our other skills we have to count on a certain result.

This is where the first grumble with Nanolith comes in. Because there will be some turns where we roll well and can do more. There will also be somewhere we have to carve in… metal. Imagine that we want to move and attack with our weapons. To make a move we have to spend dice of such a value how many squares we want to travel. If we want to shoot, for example, we need to spend dice with a value of 4+. If we roll “poorly” it sometimes involves spending all the dice just to do these two actions. In this aspect it’s quite random. Let’s still remember in order to hit it we also have to roll the dice. Only this time with red d8s, and it would be nice if we pierced the rival’s defense. Because who would want to have empty turns?

However, it’s not that these dice can’t be manipulated. Because this is where the punky stress system comes in. We can lower or raise the scores on the blue dice by one gaining stress. But why is it so stressfull?

Well, that’s precisely to use our Nanomachine abilities. Because every hero has a super, special, extra skill that we can fire off as our stress bar fills up. This skill is so powerful that it can knock down several enemies at once and leads to the kind of EPICKY plays I like best. I already forgive all the random dice placement. The more times we reach this climax of stress then the more often we can use this ability. Because each time the threshold for its use will go down. However, we must remember that the more often we bring it to this point, the faster our body will be exhausted.

Summing up the combat in Nanolith, I will say that there are solutions that I like and there are some that did not impress me. I guess I’m not a fan of the kind of dice placement that limits my actions.

Scaling

In Nanolith, we have to run all four characters simultaneously. Because, after all, we want to find out what happened to each of them. I ran the gameplay mostly solo, and sometimes my wife joined me. Handling 4 heroes simultaneously was not difficult. Because each protagonist had his turn anyway, in which we didn’t interfere with each other too much. Plot-wise, it makes sense that we have to play with all the heroes, because this is our joint adventure and some of the characters will be more important during some missions. Another big plus for Nanolith.

Playing Time

Clashes can last from 40 minutes to almost 2 hours. For that, the story layer that we learn between battles really depends on how many points of interest we want to explore.

In Nanolith we will also come across various save points that will allow us to pause the gameplay and hide everything in our boxes. Sometimes we’ll play longer, and sometimes we’ll have to feed the cat and pause our adventure for a while. A real-life example.

Quality and components

I am a huge fan of the acrylic standees included in Nanolith. The graphics on them are great and their colors look excellent. Though an important note for those opening the game for the first time. The standees have several layers of protective foil. To take it off you need sharp fingernails(I specially grew them) or something sharp to undermine this safety barrier. I recommend starting this from the bottom of the stand to avoid damaging the graphics.

As for the rest of the components, it’s good. We have solid player boards, thick tokens, nice dice and boxes for the various components. We even get sleeves for the cards, and if we had the deluxe version we could keep the stands in this second box without disassembling their bases. It speeds up the preparation for the game considerably.

Now let’s talk about stickers. We are going to stick them on our skills and weapons. They are vinyl stickerz meaning that we can peel and stick them at will. A very cool patent, which I am not very good at. Because sometimes the stickers did not want to come off, and sometimes they stayed together with the paper. Therefore, for their removal I had to hire my wife. Fortunately, she turned out to be a master at this craft. How did you manage it?

Summary

Nanolith captivated me with its cyberpunk atmosphere and the story of our heroes. I got terribly immersed in this world and can’t imagine the gameplay without playing the soundtrack from Edgerunners on my speakers. I may not be some special fan of dice placement in this game, but everything is made up for by this great system of nano epic abilities and cooperative play with nano machines. The bosses available in Nanolith will definitely stick in my memory for a long time. Not only by their gruesome appearance, but by the fact that each of them gave a different, interesting, valiant puzzle to solve.

Final verdict: I was nano shocked how good this game is

Pros

• Cyberpunk atmosphere
• Heroes that are the story
• Exceptional boss fights
• Nano abilities and the shock of using them
• Combination of two books
• Perceptiveness tests
• Acrylic standees
• Comic inserts

Cons

• Will you peel off my sticker?
• Sometimes more random than action

[Game provided by Woodpecker Games]