If nothing else, Thea: The Awakening [official site] is different, and different can go a long way.

That also makes it a difficult game to assess. Most games lend themselves to comparison with the best games in their genre, or they are clearly borrowing from other games, and I can look at how one design is in dialogue with another. None of that changes how I feel about a game, but it does help me understand and articulate my reactions.

Thea doesn’t work that way. It’s a survival 4X RPG roguelike with crafting and card combat. I can recognize all the ingredients, but the game itself is sui generis>. I can recognize the ingredients in the dish, but I’ve never encountered anything quite like it.

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In spare minutes during the last day or so I’ve been trying to get my head around Thea: The Awakening [official site]. It’s a “turn-based strategic survival game.” It feels at times like a crossover between Civilization and my beloved NEO Scavenger, in that it’s a 4X but one in which you only ever have a single village and in which individual villagers have real value. But then its combat plays out as a card game designed by a programmer who worked on The Witcher 3’s Gwent, and your exploration of its world is marked by choose-your-own tales of Slavic mythology.

It is interesting. It seems quite good. And it left Early Access last Friday.

… [visit site to read more]