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Thea: The Awakening

potatojohn

Arcane
Joined
Jan 2, 2012
Messages
2,646
Thea: The Awakening is a strategic survival game inspired by Slavic mythology and folklore and set in a dark, post-apocalyptic fantasy world.

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Seems interesting. Anyone tried it?
 
Self-Ejected

Ulminati

Kamelåså!
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Jun 18, 2010
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20,317
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DiNMRK
It popped up in my steam queue today. But I'm kind of wary when it comes to early access indies. If someone wants to take one for the team, I'd like to hear if it's any good as well.
 

Xathrodox86

Arbiter
Joined
Oct 27, 2014
Messages
760
Location
Nuln's labyrinth
I'm interested in this. Anything that is dark fantasy isntead of high fantasy is of interest to me. Also pot-apo in a fantasy world? That's rare.
 

rado907

Savant
Joined
Apr 23, 2015
Messages
249
I tried this one today. Quick impressions:
- The game feels like a mix between Master of Magic and King of Dragon Pass.
- I love the art-style.
- There is a hexagonal world map and you start with a village and a small party.
- There are 4-5 characters in the village and you assign duties to them. They can gather raw resources, craft goods&tools from the raw resources, and construct buildings. The assignment interface is cumbersome. If you get more than 15 villagers or 3-4 villages, the micromanagement would become impossible. Not sure if you can even found additional villages, though.
- Combat is turn-based with a playing-cards gimmick. Has some tactical depth.
- There are many events, similar to events in KoDP.
- There is a kind of a story that drives your exploration. Also many quests around the map.

I got killed after about half an hour of playing. I engaged into unwise fights, lost too many characters, and finally succumbed to waves of wandering monsters.

IMO the game has potential. Might end up being a decent heir to KoDP. The one danger I see is that the devs might try to bite off more than they can chew. They should decide whether they want to make a MoM game or a KoDP game. I'm not sure the two mix all that well.
 

Markman

da Blitz master
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Sthlm, Swe
Serpent in the Staglands Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Hmm. Looks interesting with that "survival" aspect. I like a game that tries to kill me all the time. Also something other than regular generic fantasy.

Will only "wishlist" for now tho, got some other shit I want to play first.
 

Dim

Not sure if advertising plant?
Joined
Feb 24, 2012
Messages
562
Location
Syndi Vegit notanatzi
- There are 4-5 characters in the village and you assign duties to them. They can gather raw resources, craft goods&tools from the raw resources, and construct buildings. The assignment interface is cumbersome. If you get more than 15 villagers or 3-4 villages, the micromanagement would become impossible. Not sure if you can even found additional villages, though.
This serious worry.
 

Kem0sabe

Arcane
Joined
Mar 7, 2011
Messages
13,076
Location
Azores Islands
Steam reviews seem to have a very good opinion of the game:

TL;DR: Great game + great devs + great originality = great purchase. This is one of the games i dare recommend to people without attaching a caveat lector.

Three hundred seventy-three. That is, at the time of writing this review, the amount of games in my steam library. Yet despite having a fair amount of games to compare Thea too i just cannot find any combination of games that would adequate serve as a comparison. Thea manages to blend several game genres surprisingly well - you will see elements of the survival genre mixed with RPG, civilization (city-building) and roguelike-lite genre while playing the game. It also has a set of game systems that i do not recognize as being borrowed from other games in those genres. Thus, If you are looking for a refreshingly original title instead of the so-manieth title that is essentially a clone of another game you played before i can strongly recommend Thea.

Intro - What is the game about?
The premise of the game is that you are a god in a post-apocalyptic world, who managed to survive with a handful of followers. Your villagers have set up a new village and now it is up to you to make that village thrive and to uncover what happened to the world. Initially you will be focused on exploring the world around you by sending out expedition parties that map the world, find old ruins that can be looted for materials and fend of enemies that threaten your town. Meanwhile random events and an overarching main quest focusing on the fate of the world will keep you busy. If you wish to do so you are free to simply ignore the games main quest and focus on your village instead if that is your preference.

One thing of note is that the game is centered around this single village. You cannot build new villages or expand as you would in civilization-type games. Neither will you be be fielding gigantic armies to take over the world - you will instead start the game with about ten villagers in your town and thats all you have. Villagers are not a particularly renewable commodity either; They can and will die if you end up having bad luck or play poorly. Every lost villager actually hurts and this is not just due to them being a somewhat hard to replace resource. Each and every single one of your villagers has his own set of equipment, a class and a set of skills. You will know that the villager you lost was responsible for crafting half of the armors your other villagers use. You will know that the warrior that died had been around since the start of the game, slowly upgrading his stick sword to a full suit of armor and decent weaponry only to fall to a horde of skeletons. You will know all of them, and you will not want to lose any of them.

Combat, Crafting and Quests
A point of interest is the games combat system, which is unlike any i played in this type of game. Combat and some of the other games activities resolve around a card game system that determines the outcome of each event. In this card system each of your villagers is represented by a card that contains their stats, skills and abilities in combat. Each turn you and your opponent play cards until all villagers and opponents are on the table, after which the actual resolution of the fight or challenge will take place. The rules of the card system are somewhat hard to describe in a review but in practice they works rather well, creating a system that is easy to learn but hard to master. There is plenty of tactical variety to the card system that allows you to develop optimal tactics and gear for your villagers, without taking overly long. An entire fight takes 1-3 minutes at most from start to finish.

Also worth mentioning is the crafting system. The game map around the village is procedurally generated and randomly seeded with resources that can be harvested. Since you only have a single village retrieving these resources requires the formation of expedition parties that go and get them for you (Always a risk, since there are plenty of dangers on the world map). Each resource has its own quality and advantages that tie into the crafting system. For example: A recipe may have the base requirement for "Wood" and "Metal" to be added. If you add regular wood the result will be average, but if you add dark wood the crafted weapon will be stronger and have poison damage. The same applies for metal so you can mix and match the stats you want. Factor into this that each weapon type functions differently in the combat card game and you will end up with a resource gathering system that actually matters quite a bit.

I cannot write in great detail about quests since the survival gameplay keeps distracting me time and again. So far i know that the game features both a a (long) storyline quest and random event quests. The former of these is the overarching story of the game while the latter happen at random. Each random event quest i encountered so far provides the player with a situation they must react to. If you see see slave hunter what would you do? Try and convince them to hand one over to you? Try and set up an ambush? Or just charge in yelling? Or perhaps... you just want to ignore the situation and walk away. So far i haven't encountered the same random event quest twice after about 20 hours of gametime though random quests are somewhat rare. Even so i am bound to believe the developers claim that the game contains 130k words of quests text - more than the average novel.

Conclusion
Normally i like to end a review with a list of the games good and bad points but in this case i simply cannot - for the sheer reason i cannot really find any problem severe enough to warrant a specific mention. Yes, the game is early access and has a few bugs but they are being fixed exceptionally fast once reported. The developers themselves are highly active on the forum and listen and respond to criticism and suggestions which is always a plus - i think we all met companies on steam who prefer the reviled "Lock, ban and delete" approach when dealing with those matters.

Usually i don't like writing reviews that only seems to sing praise without adding a critical note since a good review balances the positive and the negative aspects of a game. In this case i will be making the proverbial exception to the rule since complaining for the sake of complaining makes even less sense. If you actually managed to reach this line by reading this entire wall of text stop wasting time and buy the game. I am nigh certain you won't regret it - though you might end up regretting a lost night of sleep or two afterwards.

I'm writing this at 5:50am because I stayed up that late playing. My wife will come kill me soon, I'm sure.

This game is brilliant. The 4X portion of the game would be serviceable on its own, with interesting gathering/crafting mechanics for feeding your populace and equipping your fighters. The writing does an excellent job of giving you an otherworldly feel; it makes me want to read the mythology its based on.

The combat card game is amazing. I'd play the card game even without the 4X game. The mechanics involved in that one I think would be deep enough to support even a living/expandable card game implementation. The fact that it's tied to a whole plethora of hero stats for 6-7 different types of challenges (social, physical, combat, tactics, hex, etc.) that all play out in "combat" is what really makes the game shine. The connection between your units leveling and equipment, the writing and events that get you wrapped up in various sorts of contests, and this "combat" system that provides the test of skill for resolving all of the conflicts is why the sum of the two decent games (the 4X game and the card game) becomes something amazing.

The designers behind this are geniuses. I'm so impressed with this that I already want to buy their next game.
 

Hoggypare

Savant
Joined
Aug 13, 2015
Messages
126
It's a nice game. Strategic roguelike, with deep crafting and resource gathering system. I really like the card game, which is how you overcome challenges (combat as well as eg. social encounters or hunting). The story and settings are nice and based of slavic mythology, which is obviously more interesting than your generic fantasy. However the UI is clunky, I must admit it, and sometimes the writing is a bit dodgy (as they use very modern wording in an old fantasy setting, that sticks out, even though I am not even a native speaker).
If a newfag's oppinion stands for anything, I would recommend it.
 

Brutan

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Oct 9, 2014
Messages
127
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Romania
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Shadorwun: Hong Kong
You can find a good review of the game here: http://explorminate.net/2015/11/19/thea-the-awakening-a-review/

I bought the game and I can tell you it's great. It took me around an hour to get may bearings straight but after that it became addictive. The UI is fine as is the micro management aspect. What is not obvious form the pics or a quick view of the game is that there is to expansion or factions. You don't get to build/conquer a second city. You don't meet factions and engaging is diplomacy. You have one settlement and you try to survive while the world tries to kill you. Reminds me of SMAC (Alpha Centauri).

The game has some new concepts:
-the card game which is used not only for battles but for social/intellect "fights" etc.
-The population growth is ridiculously low. So if you lose a unit it hurts you bad, lose a couple and it's most likely an end game. It really makes you care about your units and you get the feeling of a party based RPG.
-You can't just spawn/recruit units whenever you want. They other join you or they come of age.


I highly recommend the game.
 

Elim

Augur
Joined
Feb 15, 2011
Messages
330
Project: Eternity
I'm going to wait for more good opinions on the game, but from the first look this looks solid!
 

Galdred

Studio Draconis
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Developer
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May 6, 2011
Messages
4,346
Location
Middle Empire
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
The card resolution system is boardgamey, but there are still interesting decisions to be made (that said, given that you mostly ignore your opponent's range of cards, as it is encounter specific, it takes quite some time to get the hang of it).
I think it is ok,it gets the job done, doesn't get in the way, and works better than most card based PC resolution systems (Endless Space...).
The settlement management and survival themes are quite good. My initial impression is pretty positive.
 

Dim

Not sure if advertising plant?
Joined
Feb 24, 2012
Messages
562
Location
Syndi Vegit notanatzi
You have one settlement and you try to survive while the world tries to kill you. Reminds me of SMAC (Alpha Centauri).

-the card game which is used not only for battles but for social/intellect "fights" etc.
Oppressive atmosphere you mean.

I approve of intellect fights!
 

titus

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Sep 28, 2011
Messages
1,719
Location
Romania
Your loss. I prefer it to clunky 3d animations. It's a good game so far even with the cards but the city management is not very deep, which is unfortunate.
 

Baptismbyfire

Liturgist
Joined
Sep 9, 2012
Messages
182
It's definitely worth playing at the price. "Demoed" it only to buy it on Steam (GOG rejected their submission, but you can play it without Steam once you download it) after playing few hours. The card combat system works surprisingly well, and the no expansion concept is interesting to say the least. The game as it is is surprisingly well polished, except for the clumsy UI, and since they promised to release free DLCs in the future, I think we could have a definite contender if the game does well enough to warrant full expansions. I for one hope they will flesh out the RPG element more. It will be interesting to see if it can still hold the attention of this cynical, worn-out gamer months later.
 

Markman

da Blitz master
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Dec 31, 2002
Messages
3,737
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Sthlm, Swe
Serpent in the Staglands Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Abuse the steam refund system.

Played it for an hour or so. Didnt get far tho, cooked a meal, crafted items, collected stuff and explored with the expedition.
Card fights are kewl, I like that there are several different types of "fights" based on what the quest wants.
And ye, UI can be a bit of a bitch but there's nothing wrong with the gameplay.
Nice first impressions overall.
 

Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
Joined
Feb 24, 2007
Messages
14,980
Been playing it all day since I woke up. Game is pretty fucking cool, and judging by my score, I've barely scratched the surface. OTOH, the tech tree doesn't seem that large, so it seems heavily geared in a 'replayable' sense; you can't get the whole tech tree reasonably, but you can reach one end or another pretty fast.

Writing isn't bad, combat doesn't drag on too badly, though the game is a total cunt about randomly fucking you on trivial battles once in a while if you autoresolve them. Though to be fair, I've gotten a character murdered on trivial battles myself just by not paying attention.There is a particular mechanic the game uses involving jumping characters to the front of the attack queue and making them targets that is super fucking cheesy- you can't really do the same shit because you can't create level 1 cannon fodder.

It's also just blatantly unfair sometimes. I had an event where they just straight up stole the women from my party. No rolls or anything. Then I had to do a fight to get them back- which I failed because HALF MY PARTY WAS GONE. Urgh.

That said, it kept me hooked all day nonetheless, game is really fun.
 

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