I will perhaps a bit overrate it and give it 4/5, because even though certain elements are somewhat minimalistic, they do the job, and the game's individual turn based tactical combat is pretty good. I post this review here, not in reviews, because reviews in reviews have severe length limit.


To describe the game, every day (strategic turn), one or more tactical missions will become available, of which at least one has to be completed in order to proceed to the next day. After a few days, boss mission will become available, which on day seven will become the only mission available and has to be completed in order to proceed to the next chapter (week). There are five chapters, each pitting your daughters (soldiers) against ever harder enemies or variants of enemies and bosses. By variants I do mean just higher stat values; they have more and nastier skills too.

There are several types missions with different objectives and each type can take place on several different maps. Maps can be perhaps more accurately described as arenas. Missions have some nominal difficulty, but certain types of missions tend to be generally more difficult than others. Mission type and map also determines number of daughters that can take part, from up to 2 to up to 5 in case of later boss missions.

Completing a mission yields vitae (say, money), memories (sort of skill enhancing items), shards (persistent money, more on that later) and occasionally a resurrection token to revive fallen/sacrificed daughter.
Vitae can be spend on germinating (recruiting) new daughters. Furthermore, for a fee in viate, a memory may be slotted into skills dautghers have, to increase power or add some effect. For example, some memories may cause skill to push target further right on the timeline (more on that later) on hit. Skills have only one slot to put memory in. Another memory will simply overwrite the previous.
Aside from memories, there are no other items or equipment.


Completing a mission also yields experience for daughters that participated. With enough experience, a daughter will level up, some of her stats will improve, and every couple of levels she will learn one of two new skills. There are three, later four daughter classes and each class has different skills. Note it is not picking skills from a skill tree; it is either skill A or B on level X, then skill C or D on level Y, regardless of choice on level X.

Most skills are new attacks, but a few are buffs or utility skills like Sidestep, a jump a few tiles away. Also, unlike starter skills, these learned skills can be used only once per turn.
Furthermore, daughters may sometimes acquire a trait or more after completing a mission. Traits are various permanent, passive stat or other (mostly) bonuses. While what has to happen for a daughter to get a trait (or even particular trait) is not very clear, at least some traits appear to have peculiar conditions. Or maybe it is all random. Also, some traits are class-specific.


The combat is individual turn based with a timeline. At the start of tactical mission, daughters and monsters are placed on the timeline according to their initiative. The leftmost daughter/monster on the timeline acts first (spending APs/HPs on skills or movement) and when she/it is done, she/it is moved fixed amount of units to the right on the timeline, while the entire timeline shifts to the left until next thing on it hits the leftmost end and gets its turn to act.

That would be pretty standard, except a) some skills have delayed effects, i.e. effects that are placed on the timeline and fire off when that point on the timeline hits the leftmost end, and b) some skills (or skills enhanced with certain memories) can push targets left/right on the timeline, causing them to act sooner (buffs) or later (debuffs).
On top of that, there are interruptions and reactions, which are skills that cost HPs, not APs. Interruptions cost more, generally trigger once when enemy makes an attack, cancel that attack and do their thing, usually or also damage. Reactions cost less and trigger every time something happens, for example when enemy is attacked by another daughter.

That means that, for example, daughter A may use a delayed effect skill that will three times, once every 15 initiative units, hit enemies around her...except there are no enemies around her. But then daughter B may move so that there is one tile between them and use a reaction skill, which will hit an adjectant enemy every time that enemy is attacked. Finally daughter C may step between A and B and use a skill to swap positions with a boss. Since that also counts as an attack, daughter C will stab the boss, who is now in range, once right away, and then stab him three more times each time daughter A will make her delayed attacks.

Fairly unique element is that on standard difficulty daughters can not be healed (daughters have neither healing nor damage shield skills), except by sacrificing another daughter of equal or greater level (during strategic turn), and that has implications for decision making when considering pretty much anything. From moves on tactical level, where you have to have to consider how to win but avoid damage, who can take the hit if it can not be avoided, whether using skills that cost HPs will save or drain more HPs, to moves on strategic level, where you have to consider who you will sacrifice when to heal who (so that best daughters are ready for boss battle on seventh day), who to send on which mission to gain exp (but also, possibly, damage), where to put memories (which are lost if daughter is sacrificed) and so on.
I guess some players freak over this element, because sacrificing one daughter to heal another sounds horrible, more so given the daughters to be sacrificed have names, albeit no personalities, at least no apparent ones, because there are no dialogues with or between daughters. Or with anything. Indeed the entire not eaxctly easy to comprehend story kinda unfolds itself in the background.
But sacrifices are necessary for the greater good. Furthermore, part of sacrificed daughter lives on in form of nifty special trait healed daughter gains, until overwritten by trait from another sacrifice.
(The game reportedly draws some inspiration from Claymore manga/anime, among other works, and indeed daughters somewhat resemble Claymores both visually and in that they keep part of their fallen sisters within, as a trait.)


Finally the dreaded roguelike element. If you can not continue or get daughters killed by a boss, you can start another recollection (run within the same save). You will lose everything except cemetery (pool of fallen/sacrificed daughters) and shards.
Killed daughters keep their level, traits, even exp, but lose memories (meaning those items you slot in skills). The same applies to sacrificed daughters, except their exp is, I think, truncated to zero, i.e. a daughter level 10 with 1,000xp will keep level 10 and 0xp, if sacrificed. With resurrection tokens obtained from rescue type of missions, you can revive any daughter from cemetery, even those that died in previous recollection(s). However, rescue missions appear only seldom and are death traps themselves.
Shards are sort of money you can spend on (turn on) rememberances (various global bonuses for current run). Before I get to them, note that while you earn shards in current recollection (run), you can only spend them during the next recollection. For example, if you earn 500 shards, you can not spend any until you restart, then you can spend 500. If you earn another 300 in your second recollection, can you spend 500 + 300 = 800 in the third.
Shards can not be spent on just any rememberance, but only those you have unlocked, and you unlock them by simply getting further in the game. Given that you will always have enough shards to unlock more or less all available rememberances, shards element of the game is somewhat superfluous.
As for rememberance bonuses, they are many from like flat out bonus damage, experience etc. to new daughters starting at level X or skipping an era.
Furthermore, if you killed a boss in one recollection, boss mission is available any time of the week in the next recollection.
Given all this, if you restart, you can very quickly, if not instantly, get back to where you were and difficulty there will be lower than the last time. Indeed it could be said that rememberance screen is just difficulty screen, where every time you restart, you will have more options to decrease game difficulty.
What to make of it? It is unlikely you will finish the game in single recollection, but 2-3 will likely suffice to unlock everything and kill the last boss.


The game runs in some Wine (e.g. 6.1) and Proton. I noticed a few glitches (some Wine related, some not), but nothing egregious. What mildly irks me is that it is an Unity game that has been ported to several consoles, therefore native Linux version could have been made without massive effeort, but was not.
UI could stand some improvements, such as sorting memories (items) by effect type or reviewing slotted memories or bestiary during missions, but is mostly okay.
The game is not exactly opaque, but neither entirely clear about how various elements or bonuses work or stack. It confuses even tooltips. Again, not serious issue, it can be worked out, but I still find it an antipattern worth of mention to design a game so that X adds Y% to Z, yet without any combat log whatsoever to review what and how it contributed to final damage.

Art style is perhaps a bit low contrast, but is nice and fits the setting. Music is very good and also fits the settings. Maybe art style came first and it is the rest that fits.


More maps or bosses, or maps or bosses randomly generated would be great, but obviously the indie game's budget did not allow for that. Nevermind, what it does, it does well, it is good looking and sounding game with intriguing tactical combat and simplistic but still surprisingly rich strategic layer, without serious fails.


A few tips:
1) You can retreat from any non-boss mission any time. All at that point still living daughters will be saved, but will not be available for any mission until next day.
2) You can restart any mission by quitting to menu and re-entering, because the game does not save state of tactical missions; it always restarts them. Particularly helpful if boss mission does not go well, just make sure to restart when you are about to lose, i.e. do not wait for the last daughter to die.
3) You can combine 1 and 2, for non-boss missions.
4) You can copy game-state files and so to speak "save" for example before you even enter boss battle, because you may want to try again, but with different memories (items) slotted.
5) Some revieweres here and elsewhere observed difficulty spike in form of the last boss, which indeed is somewhat hard, as it should be, but it is not as though it would one-shot daughters or had by orders of magnitude more HPs than previous bosses. The issue may be that reaction skills daughters can learn appear somewhat inferior to other skills during normal battles, because they cost precious HPs unlike instant/delayed action skills (which cost APs) and do not cancel enemy actions like interruption skills, so players do not have daughters learn them, or use them. But since these skills trigger every time conditions are met, daughters reacting to each other's attacks can make many, many more attacks (and damage) per turn via reactions than actions or interruptions. In other words, you may spend HPs on reactions to do more damage and win sooner, to prevent losing much more HPs (you might not even have to begin with) in protracted battle, where boss does a lot of damage every turn.
Needless to say that the last bost makes classic mistake villains are prone to making and attacks last, thus allows daughters to train on its weaker minions and turn on some, if not all rememberances before the final battle. Now if it attacked without hesitation on day one, that would be an impressive difficulty spike, imo.