Recent reviews by ectal

Clearly not meant for solo play.

The game is interesting, looks nice, and has a pretty rich crafting system and a decent base-building system. I also like the concept of colony sim "from the inside". But too much of the "difficulty" relies on endless enemy respawns, and this flattens any opportunities for strategy and stealth into brute force and attrition mechanics. It's lazy and annoying. The community answer to this seems to be to tweak the server settings for solo play so that enemies are very weak.

I'll likely just wait a few months and try again, in the hopes that the developers discover that challenge and difficulty don't simply mean multiple brutal respawning mechanics.

Lazy and boring. I'm sure the game is more fun with multiple players, but like I said, it's just not for solo play at this point.

This is definitely a very interesting game. It's also wildly frustrating.

The battle mechanics are very good. It's a satisfying blend of deck-building and tile-based strategy/tactics. But apparently no one involved in making the game ever considered balancing the game. Once you familiarize yourself with the game, the difficulty curve on a quest tends to be flat. Everything is fairly manageable, Your party is doing great. Then you hit the final boss and your well-tuned team dies in 2 or 3 turns.

On some quests, you might find yourself getting up to the final boss 20 or 30 times, breezing through everything up to that point then once again losing. It becomes tedious. Basically, there is no strategy other than working to find a combination of classes and cards and identifying just the right synergies so that you completely obliterate every encounter you run into, then maybe you have a better than even chance on the final boss.

So while it can be fun, and it looks good, and it's full of great ideas, it's not recommendable.

I'm sure there are plenty of people out there eagerly waiting to howl "git gud" at me, and that's fine. I'm sure there are plenty of people who have completely mastered the game, but that requires going extremely meta and optimally understanding every detail of every card and class. And once you do that, actually playing through the game is a bit of a chore.

Ultimately, the fatal flaw is that this game cannot be played intuitively. You cannot take your time and discover and get incrementally better. If you play the game "from the hip" you will absolutely lose on any difficulty above Easy. Instead, you have to study the game, always make exactly the right move, and pray that you don't just get wiped by RNG. If there's ever a sequel, I look forward to playing a more mature and refined version of this game. As it is now, it just isn't balanced enough to feel like a finished product.

Anyway, it's not a bad game, by any means. If you like "solving" a game before playing it and you like to study a game like a class, you'll love it. If you want to have fun or have a remotely loose style of playing strategy and deck-building games, you'll find it extremely frustrating.

Short but surprisingly creepy, even a bit frightening. The room scale experience works well, but you definitely need a lot of space or things get slightly awkward.

A delightful, meditative little game. Loads of fun and very nice to look at.

If you don't have this, that's dumb.