Deep Sky Derelicts

Here's where the game wins with me: Art Style Story Longevity The only miss: The UI stops responding and I have to save / quit the game, do a full reboot. When the UI crashes, I can't interact or click with anything until I restart. Solve that bug and you get a 5 star.

It's like Darkest Dungeon but with extra steps

And in space. And there it is.

TL;DR: Imperfect Deckbuilder with a lot of combos, quests and a cool setting. In this game you create a deck of cards for each your 3 characters. The cards are added by equipping gear or investing in your charakter's skills, which means there is a lot of variety across all the different classes, subclasses, weapons and support modules. At the beginning, the cards are pretty basic and the pace of the game can be a little slow. But it starts to get much faster, after you unlock synergies and combos between your characters. If you have played deck-building games before, the game may become a bit easy in campaign mode after that point, especially if you do all the side quests. And boy, are there a lot of side quests. Some are fetch-quests, some are puzzles, a lot of them have multiple choices and outcomes. Not all of them have a big impact on the direction of your run, but they add a lot of flavor. After 100h I played through the campaign about 7-8 times and I've pretty much had my fill, trying all the classes and seeing most quests. There is also Arena Mode with the DLC, which is as hard as tungsten balls and I have not been able to beat, as of yet. This one seems very RNG-dependent, as you can not buy or craft items you want, so all items and most of your cards are completely randomized. This game is not as polished as other, "top tier" indy titles. - The UI is a bit sluggish at points and I encountered one UI softlock. - The game loads textures very slowly when you first see them. - Item management in the later stages of the game is a bit tedious. - The game isn't balanced super-well. If you use all of the game's systems, it becomes quite easy, but at the same time there are some enemies with very annoying abilities. Ultimately, the game was very fun for longer than I expected. Recommended for anyone, who wants to build a weird combo deck and see if they can wipe the final boss off the map in a single turn.

A great game...if you steer clear of what frankly I consider to be trap options in character creation. Which it definitely does NOT help you with. A bunch of the classes have some pretty glaring weaknesses, especially at the start, and in a vacuum of information it's very easy to pick a combination of characters that may struggle (several are good against enemy types that do not appear frequently, while others take a LOT of money to support - money you won't have at the start). Once you get going, it goes from 'hard' down to 'pleasant as long as your brain stays on.' But the getting going is the tricky bit. Oh, and the writing has some glaring weak spots...every single in-universe datapad I've discovered was clearly written by someone so far up their own ass they could never find outer space again and would be lost eternally in their own intestines. Possibly that was the intention, but sadly I don't think so.