Lost in the open
Before a meeting with a rival king you get ambushed by his assassins. You survive with a deep wound and just 2 bodyguards. You have to now escape the kingdom while being pursued by the enemy army, bandits, assassins and bounty hunters.
You navigate the map similarly to FTL by moving between nodes that can contain random text encounters, stores or enemies. You can't hang around as the nodes get overtaken by the enemy army, replacing the nodes with encounters with armored soldiers that give minimal reward.
Combat relies heavily on positioning and status effects.
Characters are defined by their class, stamina (AP), HP, armor (blocks X damage before breaking), initiative, dodge.
Each class has set weapon and armor than you can upgrade at stores. They start with a basic attack + 1/2 special abilities randomly chosen from the pool of their class abilities (these range from extra dodge, attacking and taking a step back, disarming someone, pushing enemy back or applying status effect like blind, stun, poison, bleeding, etc).
Characters gain XP depending on number of kills in battle. During the level up you get 1 skill point to upgrade current class abilites + a choice between 1 of 3 new abilities or 3 additional SPs.
Each ability has 2 upgrade branches that you need to choose between- for example Bleed skill can be upgraded to lower it's cooldown and raise crit chance and damage or increase it's accuracy, bleed amount and demoralize enemy and his nearby allies.
It's very heavy on RNG and doesn't allow to position your characters at the beginning of combat.
During one of my attempts I had a fight with assassins before I recruited even 1 additional ally. All characters spawned so close to them that they were all able to reach my party during first turn. Assassins apply stacking poison that lowers max stamina and king was quickly killed.
During my winning run I met 2 archers that joined me for some food before first fight and found a free pickaxe that gave me blue option in mine to load up on gold, which allowed me to recruit a bounty hunter and a heavy bandit and upgrade all my weapons