Posted on: September 26, 2023
robicallag
Verified ownerGames: 72 Reviews: 4
Jury's still out
At the moment I'll put this at three stars. I'm mostly writing this in hopes that the developers watch GOG reviews, but I'll talk about my initial impressions overall first. Right now I've beaten the game at 0 anomaly with five of six heroes. You should get a decent idea of the basic mechanics from YouTube or what have you. You pick dice, you draw dice on your turn, you have to play "harmful" dice and you have discretion over "helpful"dice. There's a crazy number of buffs and debuffs, which lead to crazy interactions. It follows the basic schema laid out by Slay the Spire: build your dice pool to keep pace with the escalating threats, balancing consistency and power. I don't know how long I'll keep playing it, but I've been generally mostly enjoying playing it so far, at 0 anomaly. Except... The hero Austra is an absolute nightmare. I beat the game once with her out of necessity, and I would rather die than play her again. The game is already about managing long-term variability, but this is a character where everything is random all the time. Alternatively, long-term and short-term variance collide, as cards let you control short-term variance, but only if you draft enough of them. As far as I can tell, the only sane way to approach her is to ignore all her signature mechanics. Whoever thought "this randomly generated game needs more randomness" is wrong. On the other hand, Sothis could be great if the UI were updated for him. You increment a number for dealing damage to enemies and healing your guys, and a bunch of his effects are keyed off whether that number is odd or even. Bizarrely, the effects keyed off the evenness of this number don't change based on whether it's even. For a game with a crazy number of buff-driven interactions, I dunno, I hope they'll throw us a bone on this one. Moonie, Cellarius, and Hevelius are cool. And I wanted to get this down before trying out Orion.
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