Thea: The Awakening

This game is so complex but rich in flair, story, advice and tool tips. Where to start. I haven't played the first part of the campaign through, so bear with me. (wall of text/) You are a god! Cast out from the heavens or suchlike by the Darkness (evil stuff!). Fortunately you have believers and you set about finding your way back. (grossly shortened - I really like the story) Characters: Each character (toon) can do two thing I guess: Fight and craft or gather. All toons can fight, but if it's a gathering toon he/she is strong in that respect. I started with 10 toons; 6 in a exploring party (think kinda D&D/roleplaying here) and 4 in the village - crafting and gathering. Each toon is very very different with different skills and abilities. You can merge the exploring party with the village and pick and choose which to go where. Food and wood and most critical to survive, and if your exploring party runs out of food you will starve and die. When the party is exploring you will find some areas that has a icon above it. Event time! A screen comes up with your possible choices on it. You select one > Search ruin, and sometimes the ruin is abandoned and sometimes it's not. And this is leading to... Fighting: This is where I was most sceptical because it's card driven, but I must admit I was wrong. I dislike card driven games but I really like it. Your fighters are the cards, some fight and some stay back supporting. The supporting toons use their skills to help a toon fighting. There's more to it than this. Oh, and keep some armour and weapons and the village. There's other partys running around with ill intent! Crafting: This is where the game really shines. It's so simple and yet so complex. You can use nearly everything you gather or find. To make a hammer I used a iron bar, some wood and some other stuff (I can't remember). But if I used some other material, like steel, the time it took to make would be longer but the weight and the Research (see tech) would be greater. You can cook meals, develop tools, weapons, clothes and construct buildings. And when you click on a item, for instance a weapon, you can see what it's made out of! YAY! Tech: You have a tech-tree and I noticed that when you search ruins and develop new tools you develop Research to do new things. There's Gathering, Crafting and Construction Research. I just researched and few Gathering things and when it's done I get 5 pieces at my village and a known location where I can get the stuff. Village: It's fairly like Civilization and not like Civilization. There's children that grow up and you get another toon. But here is the smart thing: You decide if you need another fighter, gatherer or crafter. Sweet! You can do so much more. But the wall of text is growing too long. (/wall of text) In short: It's something like Civ/D&D/Warlords all put together. This game is so deep! But the game not fan of playing in full-screen mode. When I play it full-screen I have difficulty clicking on the buttons. There, I've said something bad about the game at last. ;) Please look at the tutorials! You can't live without them! It's something that the devs need to fix, but I'll play it nonetheless. It's too good to pass up! ...and yes. I played the game in window form not full-screen.

The core of Thea is like X-Com meets Age of Wonders with King of Dragon Pass style encounters thrown in. You have your base where you construct buildings, items, and research like in X-Com. You send parties out to forage and fight, like Age of Wonders. Sounds awesome! And it is!...the idea anyway I can't remember the last game that had a worse interface, inventory, and ease of understanding than Thea. So many design decisions that would seem obvious are absent. An option to equip the strongest available item in a category? Nope. The slightest hint as to what different crafting ingredients can affect? Nope. Easy to tell at a glance what a party member's stats are going to be in a challenge? Nope. Easy to understand stats? Nope. Meaningful information on how tough an encounter is going to be before you decide to commit? Nope, nope, nope. Every time you want to form a new party is a total chore. Every tedious encounter that you can beat without taking any damage can't be auto-resolved because there's always a slight chance the AI will fuck you during auto-resolve and kill your experienced party members which is an instant game over for your 12-15 hour effort (unlike X-Com, high level characters are mandatory rather than a bonus and they cannot be easily replaced with recruits). Some "combat" events you can choose to sneak or talk instead of fight, but that's risky because unlike fighting, the game will not tell you how good the party is at that challenge; there is a social challenge but no social stat. You have to make a guess based on multiple stats (speech, attractiveness,..."feint"? wtf?) that you had no idea about and the game won't let you look at before deciding to accept a challenge. The game explains nothing. The tutorials are terrible, the tooltips mostly absent, random events will pop up to totally fuck you over until you give up and start save scumming. I wanted to like this so bad but gave up after the 20th frustrating UI issue. Only buy on a big sale.

Has a thick atmosphere with a not overused theme. Really displays well a world, which slowly recovers from the darkness. Most of the story events are even synchronised and not only text based. Because the events are randomised, it is possible that you get the same event in a row, but it happens not that often. Also gathering, ressources and crafting items is neither too easy nor too grindy. And the card game also offers enough depth to improve your skills. This is not a clone of any other game and is worth a try. There is also a very enjoyable co-op mode. Hope you guys enjoy the world of Thea as much as did

This is both a question and a review. Question: This game was in early access on steam, and I wonder why it left early access? Let me explain. I have played an early access version in Nov 2015. At the time, the game felt still unfinished and very "Unity"-like. The devs promise (at least on steam) that they are currently working on a large free update. These things combined make me wonder if the devs 1) made tremendous progress the last two months, and 2) will they keep improving the game, or 3) are they going to sell "early access" updates as payed expansion in the near future? Review: Don't get me wrong, the game is a blast, with good game mechanics & concepts. But the game is also tedious. Also, I turned the music off after my first play through. I really like the semi-random skill progression of your people. It makes you change and focus people to specific tasks. Combined with an extensive crafting system will make some unique characters. If you get to know the skill system, you can find satisfying solutions to otherwise straightforward kill-or-be-killed encounters (in the built I played, social skills made to game too easy however, but this can be better balanced in the current version). Also, the way to progress in research depends a lot on how much you craft. So, you will be crafting (and using) low level equipment. That is actually a tip... top tip: craft whatever you can and see your research explode! The tedious part is when ravaging monster groups become strong. You can no longer send out small groups and expect them to survive. Therefore you will most likely have no more than four groups. One will stay in your village. You want two groups to gather resources outside your village area... which leaves a single party to scout, hunt new monster lairs and explore increasingly difficult events sites. At this stage, I was often bashing the "next turn button", when I suddenly realized the game ended because I met some silly win-conditions.