Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles Review (Stormquake)
Summary: A modern masterpiece, making the most of the deckbuilding genre and a turn-based medium to forge an experience that is intuitive enough for newcomers to dive into and intricate enough to delight veterans for hundreds of hours.
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In-Depth Review:
Oh boy, oh boy, where to start? I followed this project for years just from the visuals and dice-rolling aspect alone. Prior to Astrea, I was lukewarm toward deckbuilding games at best. The titans of the genre never really hooked me in, but for whatever reason, Astrea gave me a different vibe. I saw the demo was available one day and thought "I'm already interested, why not?" I played the demo for 20 hours. 20 hours. It was only the first act and the first two characters on the default difficulty. If you want that put into perspective, there are three acts, six characters, and 10+ difficulties in the full release, so I was not bluffing with that "hundreds of hours" in the initial summary, although perhaps that was already apparent by my hour count at the time of this review (I was lucky enough to be allowed into the alpha/beta test).
So WHY exactly am I so enthralled with this game? I'll break it down:
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Mechanics/Gameplay - Astrea offers an intense experience that stands above other turn-based and deckbuilder games through two main vectors: Dice and Dual Damage. The dice bit offers variety in the way one would expect. When you add a card to a deck, you just have the effect of that card. When you add a six-sided die, you have potentially six unique outcomes. Generally you have a range of "good" and "bad" outcomes, spread across three dice archetypes of Safe, Balanced, and Risky, with the intensity of "good" outcomes increasing in proportion to the frequency of "bad" ones. Now this is where the Dual Damage aspect comes in. In Astrea, there are damage types of Purity and Corruption. Purity heals you and harms enemies, while Corruption harms you and heals enemies.
Where the intricacies of the two systems meet is in the benefits of using Corruption, the usual "bad" outcome of rolling your dice, to your advantage. Every character in Astrea has access to a Virtue system which allows them to take certain actions after their health passes below a certain value. By using Corruption on yourself, you can activate these Virtues more often, and can even use them multiple times per turn if you take Corruption, Purify yourself, and then Corrupt yourself below a certain value again. This system marvelously blends the "Good"/"Bad" aspects of dice with the dual damage system, allowing you a large amount of flexibility in how you progress through your turns. Maybe that Risky die you picked didn't land on a Purity face, but that Corrupt face can still be used to your advantage. Or maybe you don't want to Corrupt yourself and want to feed it to an enemy instead, albeit with the side effect of healing them and possibly making them retaliate.
As you progress deeper into the game, you will gain access to more complex dice and more ways to bring out their true potential. One such way is through acquiring Blessings, which provide passive benefits to your character. Some of these Blessings may provide even more incentive to Corrupt enemies, making the choice to embolden their Corruption all the more tantalizing, even with the risk that they might Over-Corrupt and let loose a harmful effect. Other blessings may bolster the naturally beneficial aspects of your dice, while some may completely change the way that you play a character. You may also find Sentinels, robotic friends that journey beside you and carry their own unique dice. These friends may bolster your capabilities, or you can choose to build around them to empower their own. It is this depth of choice and the plethora of playstyles available to the player that make playing Astrea so satisfying and invoke the well-known thought of "Just one more run..."
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Graphics/Themes - Astrea features beautifully crafted 2-d characters and environments along with a "paper-doll" style of animation, which together invoke the feeling of gazing into a living storybook. This art also carries the game's Purity vs. Corruption theme through its palette, presenting gorgeous shades of blue that gradually blend into red as your eyes shift from your own side of battle to the corrupted soil your enemies stand upon. There's an extra level of satisfaction to winning a difficult fight when you get to see those crimson hues shift into celestial blues and cyans when you purify your opponent. The colors chosen are also quite soft, making gameplay easy on the eyes, which is to the player's benefit when they are up at 4 AM playing their 20th run of the night (I say this from experience).
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Music - Astrea features an engaging orchestral soundtrack, complete with live instruments. There is a large focus on ethereal-sounding strings, serene in calm moments, but driving and malevolent in some of the game's later encounters. This is held atop expertly layered percussion that pulls forward feelings of exploration and whimsy, shifting in the aforementioned later fights to emotions of heroism and urgency. Every song does well to capture what the player is up against at different parts of the story, and helps to increase immersion, while also providing tunes that may stick around in your head even after you put the game down for the night.
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Conclusion: This game is a love letter to its predecessors, while also rising above them in terms of mechanics, art, and music. It feels as if prior deckbuilders were setting the foundation, and Astrea is the beautiful building that was built around it, improving, adapting, adding, and expanding systems in a novel way to provide an experience that will feel unique and engaging to a variety of players. At this time of writing this, Astrea is my personal 2023 Game of the Year, and I plan to sink hundreds more hours into it as I get to experience and go through the game again along with new players. My only hope is that anyone reading this review will come to love this game in the same way I have, as it is truly something special that I believe will be embraced and played for years to come.