He is Coming

It's fine. It's fun to begin with but once you begin to unlock new items, which by at least most rationale should be a net positive, the fun turns to frustration. It becomes: Check first two islands for any potential synergistic items. Find none. Find 140 holy shields and feathers. Reset. Repeat around 20 times and final get some sort of synergy. Get to hydra. Die. Try another 30 times. Finally find a synergy that works. Win. Maybe 1 in 5000 holy shields is a win. See over 10,000 holy shields before your next win. Banish holy shield. It's spot is now filled with one of the 40 other garbage items in the game. Probably rusty ring. Find nearly 432 rusty rings. You have 4 banishes, so you can get rid of roughly 1% of the holy shields and rusty rings. Don't worry though because you're about to uncover over 600 royal horns. Start a band. Win. Honestly, the banishes feel like trying to stop a river from running by slapping some flex seal on a rock and praying the dulcet tones of your roya...

TL;DR - Games good, but it's so RNG heavy don't expect to win. Ever. You CAN, I've seen people who have. I haven't. 90% RNG, 10% player input kinda game. This game is so incredibly RNG heavy that it's barely even a game you can 'play' I have never beaten the last boss of a run, despite knowing exactly what he does, and what I could do to beat him. I've tried going for synergies, doing burst damage, sustained healing, sustained armor, armor regen, reducing his attack, scaling mine the longer a fight goes on, so on and so on. I have tried to win seriously, I have planned my runs based on what I've been offered, I have pivoted on the final day to a totally different build. Nothing works. I always fail, and consistently I've managed to get the boss to 5 HP out of 100. Or, I get completely wiped. I have found some in-between, but that's most of my runs. Sometimes I also get slammed first day because I just don't get an item I need, however simple it might be to come across. That all b...

Don't write reviews often, but had to for this because all these reviewers are... Wrong? Are people stupid? I can't tell. Needed to put something on here that represents what the game actually is. Overall a good game. Shallow and needs more content/playstyles, but a really good idea. Definitely good for early access. Although it's clearly an ode to y2k style RPG games, this is not an RPG. This is a deckbuilding autobattler, but it has its own thing going on too. Its all about finding weird and unique combos of items that seem otherwise useless (eg most speed builds are REALLY GOOD but on the surface speed seems like such a bad stat). Yeah, the game is unbalanced. It's not supposed to be. Items in games like these aren't supposed to be equal. It's supposed to feel good when you hit the item you want or need, it's not supposed to feel like you "win" every time you open a chest, and you're certainly not supposed to win every run. Click that holy shield... Then click something else when ...

The first area is really good, but the more you unlock the harder the game gets. Because of that it fails as a roguelite because once you beat the game once, there is really nothing left to do, runs just become way harder to find a fun synergy in. As for the second type of run you can do, it's so poorly balanced that its just not fun, and after you beat it, I'm guessing there isn't much left to do. Maybe you could squeeze a few more hours of play time if you studied all the items you unlocked and then did the 2000+ runs it would take to actually do your god build, but that's for cringe nerds and not in the spirit of roguelites, but that's who this game is seemingly made for. TL:DR fun for 45mins, then you should stop.

I have enjoyed the game so far. It is challenging and frustrating, I think by design. Players who like that sort of thing will probably enjoy this type of game. Unlike other rogue-likes, this games doesn't have meta progression except in the form of unlocking more items that you can come across. You don't have much time before the boss shows up to challenge you so you need to cobble together a workable build in order to beat each boss with their own conditions. This game rewards flexibility and it punishes players who want to try and build synergy more often than not. If you find a cool sword that has an interesting synergy don't get too attached to it because finding the other components of it are not very likely and certain bosses will counter it anyways. All in all I don't see myself spending too much more time with this. The pacing of the game moves to fast for me and the RNG determination of the game feels to heavy (yes even still). I don't mind this game mode for what it is, bu...

This game is awesome. The vibe is perfect. It really feels, visually and musically, like an old school NES/early PC era game. The art is excellent, the controls feel good, I love the music. Behind the scenes, however, is a very modern game. Rougelike at it's core, lots of items, many with fresh and unique mechanics. It makes working towards a build fun, and it also makes testing out new/random builds fun. Modern QOL improvements like speeding up battles and even skipping easy ones is very nice. I also like that not everything is fully explained. I like that you have to encounter certain new NPCs/vendors to understand what they do. Even after many runs, I'm still finding new encounters and trying to unlock new items and sets. At the time of my review, I've beaten the Woods level 2 times, and the Swamp only once. This is after many, many runs, so be aware that this is not a game you are going to win at often, but I think that's the fun. It's quick to start a new run, runs themselves ...

Just one more run... Just one more run... Just one more run... Just one more run... Just one more run... Just one more run... Just one more run... Just one more run... Just one more run... Just one more run... Just one more run... Just one more run... Just one more run... Just one more run...

On the surface, it's no different than games like Balatro or Luck Be A Landlord, but this game is VERY unforgiving. The RNG is very heavy-handed. It's early access, so this could change in the future, but for the time being save your cash and look elsewhere.

This game is such a shame, man. The concept is really strong but the 'Losing Is Fun!' mindset you need to adopt doesn't hold up for any extended amount of playtime, at least not for me. I know, it's supposed to be hard, and there's a bit of embarrassment in feeling like the game 'beat' me - like the developer is going 'neener neener looks like you couldn't git gud'. Yeah. Looks like I couldn't. Congratulations. The worst part of playing through single-player is the balancing and pacing. You can know exactly what item you need, exactly where to go to get it, and get there at exactly the right time, and the game will still not give it to you. The intention of the design is clear. You're supposed to go in with no particular build in mind, scrounging together whatever random doodads will counter the first boss' strategy, refining it into proper synergies that can defeat the second boss, then refine it further to defeat the final boss. If this is what they wanted, then in the game's curren...

I'm very torn on this game. On one hand, it is pretty simple and fun to play. Traveling around collecting items to create an interesting build is enjoyable. The two different biomes at the time of writing this review are also wildly different and provide a vastly different play experience from each other. The aesthetics and music in the game are also very pleasant. The vibes are great overall. On the other hand, this game is incredibly frustrating once you get into the weeds of it. Your build is up almost entirely to RNG, except unlike in other roguelikes, your build is do or die with little in the way of skill; either it works or you lose. And even if it does work, it needs to not be countered by the upcoming boss you're about to fight, and/or be able to scale or sustain itself against the final boss. One problem I have is that there have been numerous times where my build feels a bit half-baked and I think, "Man, I wish I had an item that did this one thing I'm lacking". Then after I...