Review: Occlude
Occlude is a new ‘cosmic-horror card game’ from developer Tributary Games. From initial appearances you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s little more than a slightly spooky Solitaire, but you’ll quickly learn that there’s a lot more going on here than those first impressions might suggest.
Tributary previously released the party game King of the Castle, which looked like decent fun, but, unfortunately enough for me, requires that you’ve got friends, so I never actually got round to playing it myself. I could also write at some length about how I love what the game’s publisher, Pantaloon, is up to: from championing the indiesphere’s most bold and bizarre games in their monthly newsletter (through which they also, for what it’s worth, give out a handful game keys) to publishing some of those themselves, including the ambitious, atmospheric Subverge from a couple of months ago. Occlude is the next in line in what might hopefully become a long list of weirder, perhaps ‘riskier’ games.
Image: Tributary Games / Pantaloon
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Developer: Tributary Games
Publisher: Pantaloon
Release: 10 July 2025
Retail Price (Steam): 7,99€/$7.99/£6.99
As mentioned at the start of this article Occlude is based on Solitaire, but, to quote the message players get upon starting it up for the first time, it’s ‘a difficult game and unlike normal Solitaire. The rules are hidden. It’s up to you to decipher the meanings of the coins.’ This presents itself in the form of rituals which players need to solve across a playthrough, each of which comes with its own stipulations.
They all have some things in common, however. For example, unlike in regular Solitaire, in Occlude, each suit can be completed from either end, meaning your final card can be anything from a 2 all the way up to a Queen. The ultimate aim of each ritual is to end the round with the correct four final cards: one per suit, chosen randomly at the start of each round. Should you, at any point, place your target card before the rest of the suit has been completed, the gold coin you’re hoping to be awarded with will turn black and display a skull: you won’t successfully complete the ritual this time, but you might get some information that will help you on your next attempt. The target cards will change, but the rules – the way you identify them – won’t.
Image: Tributary Games / Pantaloon
These rules are, effectively, what happens to the four coins when you do something in the game. We’ll take the very first ritual, The Magician, as an example: this one is given to players in the tutorial as a small introduction to the game’s core mechanics and is, by Occlude’s standards, very straightforward. The rules for The Magician’s ritual are that whenever you pick up any of the four target cards, the coin will shift position (from the top section to the bottom), and whenever you let it go, the coin returns to the top. The game is telling you, in the most simple of ways: “this is the target card.” You can right-click to mark those with a little stamp and, as long as you can go on to finish the Solitaire game with those as your final cards for each suit, you’ll successfully complete the ritual. Of course, that’s by far the easiest one: players will quickly encounter rituals where their coins move around without any clear reason as to what's causing it, at least to begin with. I know I’m perhaps not being as clear as I could be here, but there’s a good reason to be a bit coy with my language: once a ritual has been solved it takes a lot of the fun out of the game – cracking what the game is trying to tell you in each instance is, pretty much, the entire point of Occlude. I’m okay ‘giving away’ the first ritual, as I’d hope anyone playing would figure that one out almost immediately, but I’d rather avoid any hints at all for the rest.
At launch the game has seven rituals, though there are suggestions from Tributary that more might follow in the future. As it is, the seven available build up in difficulty across the playthrough, with the final one being a particularly challenging affair that might well require some additional help from elsewhere in the game. Before you get to that, there’s the other six to worry about: each of which teaches you a little bit more about the game and the world it’s set in.
Image: Tributary Games / Pantaloon
The sadist in me thinks I would’ve liked some much more devious rituals; ones where it would take me a lot longer to figure them out, but, on the other hand, I was close to getting frustrated by the lone ritual I did get a little stuck on. In the end it was actually relatively simple, and solved quite quickly with the help of some trusty pen-and-paper, a trick I carried on using to good effect for the game’s remaining rituals. Balancing a game like Occlude seems, from the outside, like a small nightmare – Tributary have implemented two different modes to help remedy this. There’s the classic mode, which is effectively the base version – ‘Occlude as intended’ – but then also the much-more-forgiving story mode which allows players to experiment more freely, so that, if they’re truly stumped, they can try and figure out their rituals there instead. After they’ve learnt the rules, they can take it back across to ‘classic mode’ and solve it with the game’s typical restrictions. I always have to be wary of sounding arrogant when talking about the difficulty level with these sorts of ‘logic-adjacent’ games, because they’re pretty much the one thing I’ll actually say I’m good at, but it does mean I probably want them to lean a bit harder than most other players (and, as such, harder than its sensible for developers to make them). That story mode remained untouched for me, but hopefully acts as a decent safety net for players who’d rather dive into the game’s lore without needing to worry quite as much about the game's more challenging aspects.
That lore has some depth to it: If you’re hoping for a world where everything is laid out neatly for you, this isn’t it. Players are given small segments of story from across a wide range of dates, as well as documents which provide clues towards what is going on in the game’s world, but it is, by intention, all a little difficult to unpack. While not required to enjoy Occlude there’s also a hefty amount of narrative outside of the game itself: the developers have a series of ten ‘Occlude Lore Drops’ planned based on Steam review milestones (up to 300 reviews), and an external ARG that’s also set in the game’s mysterious world.
If you’re completely disinterested in the story it’s all pretty unobtrusive: at some point players will need to take a glance at those documents for some fairly important hints, but otherwise it’s more-or-less ignorable. Those hints aren’t buried deep within lines of text or hidden behind puzzles: this isn’t a game which will punish you for not taking a deep-dive into its lore, though it’s clear to see that a lot of work has gone into it, and investing in it provides some much-needed substance which the game might feel a little bare without.
Image: Tributary Games / Pantaloon
I hope it does well enough that Tributary can continue to work on it, as I’m fascinated to see where they’d go next with it. There’s clearly a lot of passion going into it, so I’d love to see them expand upon it — both in the immediate, obvious form of more rituals, but then also in more creative ways: though exactly how that would manifest itself I’ll leave in their very capable hands.
It’s one of those ones where the more you’re willing to engage with it, the more you’ll get out of it. The baseline is a relatively enjoyable take on Solitaire that’ll keep you entertained for a few hours and be, just about, worth its entry fee, but for players who click with it and want to dig deeper, there’s definitely a lot more than that on offer. Moreover, I can’t help but feel there’s something quite special bubbling even further under the surface – it might not be present just yet, at release, but there’s an awful lot of potential there. For now, Occlude is awarded a 7.5/10 by IndieLoupe.com. But, out the corner of my eye… I’ll be watching.
The reviewed product was provided by the publisher.
