The combat is straightforward and fun. The story is engaging, the worldbuilding is fantastic. Most of the tedium comes into play with basebuilding, which the game designers made to be intentionally tedious and time-consuming. Want to select a new ability in the tree? You have to hold the select button for a solid five seconds. Why? Just to make you seem like you're doing work. A lot of the mechanics are like that... your followers and grow food, but you have to cook it. You have to preach a sermon every day to keep faith up. You have to clean up your followers' poop. All this busywork adds up. There were times when I wanted to venture back out into the wilds and fight the elder gods, but then I realized I needed to clean up poop and make dinner. Not my bag, as it turns out.
Half Animal Crossing with ritualistic sacrifice, half Binding of Isaac made by people who don't hate the idea of players having fun.
You can take this game at whatever pace you like. Speed through the randomly generated dungeons to get through the story or take your time and grow your village as you tend to the needs of colorful critters who also happen to be dabble in a bit of religious zealotry.
The management aspect is not very deep: you have to make sure your villagers don't starve but otherwise you're not going to be stressing over where to place structures or how you assign tasks - the AI is smart enough to make sure your followers don't starve to death because someone who's just a bit hungry snatched a meal from someone who's currently digesting their own stomach for example.
It basically plays like Animal Crossing but sometimes instead of picking up flowers your favorite villager is going to ask you to be sacrificed in your name - whic is pretty much an all around upgrade if you ask me.
The other half of the game is a top down action oriented dungeon crawler sort of deal. Zip around enemies avoiding their attacks and unleashing your own, find the best order to kill enemies and even figure out how to use your foes' attacks against each other.
If you played Binding of isaac it will all feel very familiar, one major difference is you're equipped with a tech roll with invincibility frames and a very generously low cooldown which might sound overpowered but it works wonderfully since you will be getting up close and personal with your foes, seeing as all the weapons in this game are melee - no slow moving projectile tears here.
A word of caution: while I was personally able to play the game through completion without a single issue two days after release there has been reports of game breaking bugs, so maybe keep this in your wishlist and pull the trigger when it goes on sale as content updates are also expected.
For a game that released two years ago and has been getting consistent updates, it has a lot of visual bugs that can be irritating to deal with. Gameplay is good, but the loop of the gameplay as a whole can feel a bit stilted at times.
