When you first meet Songs of Conquest’s Captain Xavier Silkspool (a brilliant fantasy name if ever I heard one), his role begins and ends as a boss tutorial for your first main campaign hero, Cecelia Stoutheart. He gives you a little runaround the game’s gorgeous 3D pixel art maps, actively chasing you down and claiming resources, monuments and territory of his own (at least compared to the altogether more static clumps of enemies you’ll have faced thus far), and when you eventually meet him in battle, you’ll learn just how vital your own crop of magic spells are in turning the tide of battle. But in Cecelia’s respective song of conquest, her duel with Silkspool would probably occupy little more than a rhyming couplet. He’s gone as swiftly as he appears, and his death is the first of many she’ll need to face in order to reclaim her homeland.
But this wily spool is not so easily unspun. Over the course of its now four-strong campaigns – with the fourth story added for Songs of Conquest’s 1.0 release – Captain Xavier crops up again and again in a variety of different guises. To the frog-like Rana, he’s their liberator and friend. To Baron Aldus, a put-upon servant of the Stouthearts and landlord to the Baryan merchants, he’s a trusted go-between that deals with the alluring necromancers of the nefarious Unseen Society. And to the old Baryan tinkersmith Bihgli Satherdown, he’s his lord and master, a debtholder whose oath must be honoured, even in death. Silkspool may not be the focus of any of particular campaign in Songs of Conquest, but he’s nevertheless a vital part of the game’s overarching chorus, and one of several background players whose ever-shifting plays at heroism and villainy help bring a richness and depth to this sprawling, tactical tapestry.
It’s the kind of anthological storytelling that, in its best moments, calls to mind the engrossing dual campaigns of Fire Emblem Fates, as well as the trio of opposing, Sliding Doors-style routes to follow in its Switch-based successor Three Houses. Each of its four campaigns may only be four missions long, but as these surprisingly lengthy tales unfold, Lavapotion manage that rare thing of making you care and root for whichever faction happens to be in your current possession – even when they’re facing off against a clan who, hours earlier, you may have been fighting tooth and nail for to propel them to victory.
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