Thea: The Awakening

You are the only humans on a large island. Grow your tiny group to around 20 people, handle logistics of gathering food/fuel/crafting supplies, level them up, deal with all manner of challenges, research technologies and build equipment (weapons, armor, rings, amulets). Challenges are a tactical card game, but your people are cards and their skills determine their available actions. Great: - tactical choices are very meaningful - things are generally intuitive - Failure hurts The bad: - one save slot - one immovable town - loading takes 5 minutes on a Ryzen 5600 with an NVME drive - difficulty primarily comes from the distance between your town and important resources - resources are hidden (with no hints) until you've researched - research requires crafting and crafting requires resources - Monsters grow more powerful/aggressive over time - regardless of your strength Putting it all together - playing on non-trivial difficulties is all about getting lucky on the map generation - and you can't tell how good/bad a map is until you've invested in research. So you won't know if a game is winnable until you're in 'late-game'. Also, if you have any family members who want to play their own save, you have to deal with save management as the game tries pretty hard to lock you into one save slot - to the point that pressing "NEW GAME" will delete your old save.

Concept: very good. Single city state survival. Story line, side quests, encounters. Challenges system. Strategy: very good. Not over large research tree (star), crafting, building, survival, fighting. Interface (appearance): a few design flaws, but ok. Good atmosphere, not annoying music. Tactical aspect - negative. The most annoying part of the game (and thea 2 also). You do not know what character will be doing what during the challenge. You can not assign character to be attacker or supporter, they are selected randomly (fire designer who invented this sh..). During attack phase you do not know what opponent will be attacked - left or right one. Fixing this +2 stars. Character develpment. below average. They progress on their own, without control. 38 attributes randomly increasing at level up. Fighter getting craft - easy. Makes this concept with challenges arguable. You can not select what your character will specialize in. It will be good in some. Again no control. Variability (game to game): good. Gods especially at high levels give advantages to make strategy different. Availability of nearby resources can change all game. Would be interesting to have campaign with all races (elves, orcs, etc). All games are long to very long. No rush. Interface convenience: below average. Tons of minor flaws. Selecting different group on the same tile? Go through all groups. Equiping group? 50! clicks to give required amount of food. Group joins other camp for the night? It is disbanded, reequip. Comparing characters - view only 1 at a time. Status (some of them) is checked in the beginning of the round. Your crafter WAS idle and produced nothing. Showing resources hides group and path. Why?

An unstereotyped game. Turn-based strategy roguelike, where the combat system is an original card game. Sounds weird, but I'm really glad I purchased it. Easy to play on normal difficulty, requires deep choices on harder difficulties. I look forward to what this studio produces in the future.

Let's start with the complaints. - While the list of random events is quite large, the same ones seem to appear at almost every walkthrough (while others almost never happen), making things repetitive pretty quickly. - Forget simple explorers and gatherers: if you're sending out a party, it needs to be big and tough enough to fight monsters of an increasing level of difficulty based on turn number. Even if you manage to avoid roaming monsters (which you can't really, because they keep spawning and most of the time it's dark and you have terrible visibility), some of the random events force you into some pretty tough fights. And you can't even accompany your gatherers with your fighters and then leave them to their work, because stationary camps are also subject to random events. - There's a good variety of resources and crafting recipes, but many (if not most) are useless: by the time you can afford to spend research points and have people gather the resource/craft the item, you will have looted enough with your fighter party or will have access to better options already. - There's a ton of micromanagement, especially with crafting. With that being said, the game is really fun and satisfying, and I've played countless hours, so clearly I'd recommend it overall.

I spent the weekend playing this game, and I'll have to say that the other reviews are pretty spot-on. CONs 1. like many others have said - LOTS of micromanaging. The food/supplies mechanics are good, but they quickly become tedious. Much of the game manually controlling small expeditions to gather resources. 2. The Challenge system is definitely confusing. I've played (and won) many, many challenges... but I still barely understand the mechanics of the card game. The fact that there are so many varieties, and these varieties appear to follow slightly different rules, does not help things. However - if you let the game auto-resolve, your encounters become more or less like a dice-roll based on your current stats... like many, many other games. So you can skip this if you'd like 3. Story is light. I didn't think I was the kind of person who played games for their story... but apparently I am, and this story isn't terribly engaging. PROs 1. The game is overall very fun. You can stop/save at any time, and you can do meaningful things in a short period, making it a great pick-up game. 2. For achievement hunters, there's plenty of unlocks and progression. I didn't count the number of gods, but it takes effort to level them up and unlock them... so you could bury hours into this. 3. Many of the events have more or less random outcomes, which makes it definitely replayable. Overall, I'm not sad I spent money on it, but I probably won't be spending a whole lot more time playing. Definitely a decent buy if you can get it on sale (it's definitely worth it if you can get it for <$10 US)