Thea: the Awakening - Slavic TBS survival roguelike w/crafting & card-based combat

Games
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EDIT: Game is now out of Early Access as of 11/20/15.

Thea: the Awakening entered Early Access on Steam this week but the devs says its due for full release by year’s end. I bought it last night and played for a couple of hours; its a fascinating twist on fantasy turn-based and, despite the horrible title, seems to have a lot of potential.

Their elevator pitch: 'There are no heroes, no monster slayers, and no great armies ready to banish the dark forces that plague Thea. Just a few hopeless and starving survivors, who are desperately trying to stay alive.’

–You control only one village. Each villager has a name, strengths and weaknesses, and you assign them to gathering, crafting or construction. Children grow to adulthood and get put to work. Village population is small and manageable.

–Or you assign some villagers to an expedition party to scour for more resources and do battle with roving bands of creatures. You must make sure your party sets out with food and fuel, or they won’t last long. After an encounter, the party must often come rushing back to the village, to care for the wounded and replenish supplies.

–Because there are few villagers, and they’re all named, you get attached to them akin to an RPG. When a favorite dies, you feel it.

–Combat is card-based: each village or expedition member appears as a card in the combat screen and either becomes a combatant or a tactical card. Wounds incurred in battle carry over to the larger strategic game.

Having tried several battles, my gut tells me the old cliche "easy to learn, difficult to master’ applies. The battles are not long, and employing tactics can make a huge difference. The combat is more than just sending in your toughest, best-armed villagers.

–Interestingly, fighting is not always necessary, and this card-based system is also used to resolve non-combat encounters, challenges like diplomacy, disease, curses or intelligence tests.

–World is based on Slavic mythology.

–Worlds are randomly generated. You play as a god controlling the humans, and you can choose from among several gods with different bonuses.

–The game is rougelike in that you have only one save file – and if your villagers are unable to survive, its game over. However multiple playthroughs give XP to your god character, so there is some advancement even with defeat.

–Text events pop up randomly, reminscent of King of Dragon Pass.

–A day/night cycle, with weather effects. Fog of War lifts only temporarily, and returns to areas where you are no longer exploring.

I’ve only played two hours but intend to spend more time this weekend. The tutorial sucks. I would recommend a video or two. The UI needs some work, there is some poor writing and spelling mistakes. No way to set volume or difficulty level, yet. But hey, its early access.

But – the devs seem fairly responsive and in fact pushed four hotfixes out in one day this week in response to issues found. I’ve had no crashes or technical issues so far. It has more than 50 reviews on Steam so far, and not a single one is negative.

Its on sale for $18 until Oct. 5th, then it’ll be $20. Not sure if it goes up when it comes out of EA.

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Wow, this looks great, thanks for the tip!

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Thanks for pointing it out, I never would’ve looked this one up otherwise. If it’s still $20 when it comes out of early access, I’ll probably give it a try.

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You had me at Slavic. And then again at TBS.

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Reminds me a lot of Hinterland from Tilted Mill. However, I think this one is really working a lot better for me (and I liked Hinterland quite a bit). A lot of the writing and your little helper reminds me of Eador. Finally, there are some neat little quests and interludes reminiscent of King of Dragon Pass, but they generally result in combat, unlike KODP.

Speaking of combat, this game has a lot of great ideas on how to handle it. First off, the card game you play during combat is a lot of fun. Secondly, the card game will be used for combat, hunting, hexing, cursing, diplomacy, etc. I’ve only done hunting, fighting and warding off disease, but it is great to see how the different situations affects your characters abilities. The card game is pretty complicated with half your units attacking the opponents and the other half acting as support. There are a ton of stats and abilities in the game. This will take quite a while to get them figured all out, but will be a lot of fun doing so.

Gathering is pretty straightforward, with that being it’s own skill. Crafting and constructing are very similar, as both rely on the same Crafting skill, and the need for assorted resources. A really cool touch is all the variety you can have in crafting. Everything needs two resources and a catalyst. Shifting different ingredients in and out will give the product different stats and weight.

I just played for a couple of hours and didn’t want to stop. Highly recommend people picking this up, as it seems a really solid product.

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I may have been getting too old for this shit, but just the title makes me balk. Survival! crafting! roguelike! cards! It’s like it’s trying to ape the potential core audience so hard that it feels gratuitous.

But your impressions are good, so that’s me just being cranky :P

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You had me at…just about everything. Will definitely check out the videos but there’s no doubt in my mind that I’ll be grabbing this.

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Yeah, the more I read about this game, the more sold I am.

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More videos.

Here’s one I found from Das24680

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despite my aversion to all things EA etc, I grabbed it. sigh. will let you know how i go

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Yeah, I titled the thread intentionally that way because I’d had the same reaction at first. I thought the devs were throwing in everything they could think of in hopes of grabbing more sales.

But… this mash-up seems to work, at least after 4-5 hours of play. Part of what I like is that the resource needs seem simple, at least at the start: food and fuel. Food and fuel. The village needs them, your traveling party needs them. It’s easy to wrap my old brain around.

What I love, love, love is that it is ‘TBS survival,’ not ‘TBS build an empire and conquer everyone else around.’ Not that there’s anything wrong with the latter, but AoW3 scratches that itch quite nicely. This survival approach feels quite fresh.

I also appreciate that the number of villagers/explorers is relatively small. Every life matters. Every death hurts. No stacks of dozens or hundreds.

In my game last night I sent out a party of 5, and left 5 others in my village. The party ventured into a dungeon in which you could turn right or left at the entrance. I chose left, faced a huge battle and my five guys and gals emerged gravely wounded. I then tried rushing them back to the safety of the village, but halfway back they got attacked by a couple of roving bands of creatures. Three died in the first attack, the other two in the second.

And this is when I fell in love with the game, for my pulse was quickening. This was not about building better units or improving my town structures or ordering up five more archers. This was about five dying people rushing desperately to make their way back to their village across a hostile countryside. And during that sprint, I was genuinely anxious. I rarely feel that in games anymore.

So with the community now cut from 10 to 5, I tried turtling a bit. My village had 3 children at this point, and I hoped to survive long enough that they would become productive adults. But resources were scarce, and I decided not to wait – I sent out two of my five adults to look into the nearby fog for some more resources. I would not allow them to stay out long. Alas, it was a cold and cruel landscape and the party of did not survive. That left just three villagers alive, huddled and afraid in the town, and I decided it was time to start over.

I do hope the devs use this early access time to give T:tA some much-needed polish, and better use of tooltips. One thing I hate, hate, hate is that some of the writing uses modern-day colloquialisms (for example: ‘party on!’ and ‘cya’) that break the immersion of the Slavic setting. The tone is not consistent, and some of the writing is trying to be hip and modern. It doesn’t work.

And finally… I love the card-based encounter system but still need to wrap my head around it. There is a dev-produced video somewhere about just that mini-game, and I need to watch it. I think the system has potential and its a welcome change from traditional tactical combat in many TBS games.

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I got the feeling that they are not throwing everything in to appeal to the current trends but more to implement certain features on a tiny budget with a small team. Eg.: card battle system instead of a tactical map with tons of animation requirements.

This does look like it could be special though.

-Todd

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Be thankful there are no zombies.

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:(

Maybe as DLC later on?

-Tom

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Yep, straight after the post-apocalyptic DLC!

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One thing I’m not grokking is how you actually win. Is there a victory condition, or is the idea just to see how long you can survive?

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That’s a good question. I’m not sure. I assumed it was simply, as you said, to see how long you survive. But then I found this in a Q&A with the developers. It seems there is a story-driven series of quests that eventually come to an ending. Or endings.

Then there are the two main quest lines designed to help the players find out why the Darkness came. It has the potential to get rid of the Darkness for good, or at least to ensure a future for mankind. There are three different endings stemming from the main quest line. Not all are available to every god, so if you want to see them all, you may have to experiment with different gods.

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Yeah, I’m seeing some of the variables already in the quest line. I’m also seeing a lot of times I have many possible answers unavailable to me. I’m assuming that is due to the stats of my party, my god, or even who I’ve talked to?

I can definitely see some replay ahead of me. My only disappointment so far, is how far I’m progressing. I was able to fare a little better than tylertoo in that dungeon. I think I only lost a single villager. I still haven’t understood how the wounds work for sure. I have a medic in my party and they say that helps you survive wounds. I think I have been reduced to zero health in battle, and I don’t think that is instant death. instead, I think it just increases your chances of dying. I know I’ve had someone gravely hurt, they survived the first turn post-battle but succumbed to their wounds on the next turn. It is a great way to add suspense after the battle.

Anyways, since I got through that dungeon, I’ve been on a pretty good run. My village has yet to be attacked, so I’m not feeling much trepidation. Since you can’t pick difficulty yet, I’m sure we’ll get a much better variety of challenges later in development. Still loving how they put this game together.

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I am trying to understand how this game works but a bit more info from the game itself would be nice. Wood production is terribly slow and it seems that cooked food does not count as rations? But it has something that makes me want to figure it out.

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Picked it up this morning and poked around the interface a bit. I’m afraid I’m going to have to shelve this until the ability to dismantle children is patched into the game.