Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles Review (Poobah)
I'm 21 hours in now so it seemed like a good time to leave my thoughts on this charming roguelike. TL;DR, good stuff up front: it's definitely a recommend for any fan of the genre, there's a lot to like with lots of interesting mechanics to dig in to, six unique characters with a variety of play styles / build archetypes, lovely music, and beautiful art. The downsides are mostly the complexity factor: this is a game with A LOT going on mechanically, both with the characters builds and during any given turn of battle and it can be very hard to read/keep up/plan for the chains of cause and effect later in the game. This can make it a bit intimidating to get in to/learn.
For those looking for more detail, and if perhaps the developers are looking for some feedback here are my thoughts in more detail – I’m gonna put a lot more words in to my criticisms but I want to be clear that they do not outweigh the positives and that over all I very much like and enjoy this game, and while I’m not sure it’s going to hit my Slay the Spire or Monster Train levels of play time I suspect I’ll easily pass the 100 hour mark quite happily. As I said before the art is beautiful – the characters, the backdrops, the menus, the presentation of the dice, everything looks phenomenal, the music matches perfectly, the dice rolling animation is very satisfying, all good. Astrea also brings a bunch of interesting new mechanics, foremost in the opposing forces of corruption and purification and I think at its core this is a very interesting mechanic that works well – your character has a corruption bar which serves as your health, if it’s fully red then you succumb to the corruption and your run is over, simple enough, but the fun part is the virtues your character can gain access to as the bar depletes from taking damage and which notably you can use multiple times per turn if you can engineer a situation to yoyo your bar back up and down. Along with the dice based nature of the game it creates a great risk-reward type feeling, and that’s only scratching the surface of how this core mechanic is woven through and impactful on all aspects of your gameplay and character build.
Where Astrea struggles with its mechanics though is probably best explained with a comparison to the daddy of all roguelike deckbuilders, Slay The Spire. At its core Spire is remarkably elegant in its design: everything is clear, simple, and (barring edge cases) easy to intuit the function and interactions of. Damage and strength. Block and dexterity. A few other buffs and debuffs. Powers which give named buffs that do exactly the one thing they say they do on the card and no more. Astrea by comparison can feel horribly complex to approach and figure out how to put together a strong build in, from the dice themselves to the enemies and the star blessings (relics if you’re a Spire player) so many things are a tangle of interconnecting keywords and triggers and references to other things, especially on the later more complex characters and when you get deeper in to the later game fights that it can feel impossible to keep track of everything.
There are tons of interesting and fun ideas in here but honestly I think there are maybe too many packed on to each character and err on the side of thinking that maybe one or two of the weaker/less impactful ideas should have been winnowed out at some stage to give more focus to the better/stronger ones. This is most frustratingly felt in how the large number of ideas built in to each character can make it feel quite difficult and a bit reliant on RNG to actually draft a properly functional “deck” because the sheer number of different dice available means that sometimes you just won’t see enough of the ideas that you’re trying to lean in to. The game feels to be designed around on what I think of as “synergy packages” - once I began to understand what was going on with each character I could see how dice are grouped into sets / designed function in conjunction with one another often I must say, as a bit of a down side, with little to no overlap/utility outside of the set/synergy package – this in conjunction with the sheer number of different dice and ideas within leads to the struggles in achieving a feeling of consistently being able to draft something functional.
Adding to this, and I don’t know for certain but based on the presentation I don’t think there’s any weighting in terms of the rarity of each individual die - dice are categorised as Safe, Balanced, or Risky with each successively higher potential up and down sides, but you typically see one of each type at a reward screen (or you pick a chest that has 3 of a given type) and it feels like within a category each die is equally likely to be offered. In comparison Spire has card rarity with weaker but foundational and ubiquitous cards being in the common rarity so always readily available to form the starting point of your build, and then the uncommons being more specialised and powerful, and the rares being fewer in number but often build defining – obviously you don’t always build a great deck in Spire and sometimes you have exceptionally poor card luck but this system seems to me to offer a less random, lower variance and more natural feeling progression for building up your deck.
I’ll finish by saying that having written several paragraphs of criticism my deep enjoyment is testament to how good the good parts of the game are, and how satisfying the character builds feel when they work. I also think that there’s plenty of room for some of this stuff to get ironed out with patches too because as I said the core is very strong.