Recent reviews by Kepab

I can tell the Golden Axe and Chronicles of Mystara are strongly in the inspirations for this, and by goodness - the visual style is so delicious.

It is only 2P and will very likely stay that way by purposeful design; there's permanent character upgrades and roguelite per-run style items and upgrade choices, which all needs certain amount of affordances in UI and design.

As for the gameplay, I had a bunch of fun! Some little things didn't really go through to my skull, like "Deflecting" incoming enemy attacks which I never knew if I'd actually pulled it off once or twice in the heat of a battle or if I was just always eating hits straight into my face - most of the time definitely the latter. Even the practice round thing where you can practice any technique like "Deflect" specifically with your Player 2 was very tricky as player attacks do not have much if any wind-up and tell, so it's pretty much impossible to deflect your partners attacks except by massive luck. But for the main game it's all PvE/coop, and gameplay worked as expected. Fun encounters and enemy types and surprises. The roguelite pattern also works pretty well - even if it's a shame to lose a boss battle at the end of a long run, it doesn't really frustrate as much since you get upgrades and permanent progress for your next runs.

There's a few technical issues, particularly if either of your players uses a keyboard - I'm assuming under the hood the input actions "Pause" and "Cancel/Close" both bind to ESC on keyboard, and when you're in store/upgrade UIs, ESC will prioritize the "Pause", effectively voiding the "Cancel/Close" so a keyboard player is not able to exit some UIs unless they play with another player that can walk into next screen or unless they find some other action that closes the UI (maybe opening your inventory can close some other UIs?).

It's fun, it's polished, it's not too small, the systems involved are fun and work well enough. As a theme this whole magical academy thing is fun, and builder/manager games are a thing I like in general - just one thing that feels odd; not bad, not wrong, but specifically different from some other builder/manager style games I've played, and that is how sometimes progression feels like a puzzle. Like I'm stuck on a couple of fronts; I can still use what I have and kind of increase amount/scale of some stuff, but at the same time there's at least a few things I maybe can't reach to actually widen enough the possibility space to get what I need to progress another step, actually widen up the actual space or systemic progression. I don't not like it, but it takes a different kind of approach - I guess in other games usually I'd just build the prerequisite building/item, dig more of gold, but here it takes a bit of planning and patience. And I've decided that's a good difference to have.

Easily top 3 of the demos I played this Next Fest! Almost five hours on the clock, having played multiple rounds over and over with friends - feels like this scales nicely whether you're playing with three or four friends so it's not the typical bother when looking at how to schedule with who are online and busy evenings.

The mood and visuals somehow remind me of Risk of Rain, but visuals are generally higher-definition.

Good replayability with a permanent progress/bonus purchase system with a currency you get from playing and completing dailies (as if this were a MOBA or some other massive community-based game; I'm not sure if the dailies fit here). Okay fun playing solo, too, and nicely paced to play with friends - good useability features for multiplayer, with ability to share found items (Memories, Concepts, gold) and the whole deal with "skills as swappable objects" allows for larger breadth of customization and builds.

Looking forward to the full game!

(Played the free Demo during 2025-02 Next Fest)
The "Golden Idol" style mystery-solving mechanic is a solid inspiration and keeps on giving! The 3D perspective, zoom and rotation are a good, fresh angle into this, as well as combining words to find out more and finally the alternative solves to each puzzle.

And to the devs, my condolences on the app name typo - I've just been going through Steamworks stuff at work and couldn't help but notice some docs about how you might not be able to rename a store item once you first publish the store page. Maybe you could contact Valve and ask for help in a special-case situation since keeping the typo probably benefits absolutely no-one?

(Played the DEMO)
Demo seemed plenty fun - I even restarted after having won the game once and had another go right away to see if I can build some truly outrageous synergies for killing more hapless little people even more efficiently the next time around. Turns out: yes, it was possibly and I managed to do just that. There's nothing quite like the feeling of achievement and success when a plan comes together...

Resounding recommendation for this giant of a game, as much as in honour of how this team, production and result respect the player in so many ways - from dutiful patching, free additions and improvements to the overarching philosophy of "just making a game the devs themselves are proud of and want to play", in a freakishly rare circumstance where nothing else was demanded of them by investor parties. These unique circumstances led to a something of a masterpiece.

It should be stated to be helpful towards just any player coming the way of this game with interest, that the Dungeon & Dragons gameplay mechanics are plenty wide and complex to get into at first, and with all the quite justified buzz about the romances, roleplaying and player choice in this game it is still a very combat-oriented game: players deeply allergic to turn-based combat and "large" systems of character creation, skill and trait selection, meaningfully wide set of options at most of times, etc., should consider weighing their interest with realistic expectations of the game as a whole, with lots of UI, choices and menus being a part of it. However, it would seem due its wide popularity that not only hardcore tabletop D&D players have gotten on with the game extremely well with some patience to get into it at first, and of course this being Steam one can always purchase and test the game for under the two hour limit and still return the purchase if they deem it is not for them.

Very solid game in the bullet heaven category: it has a solid foundation in the Deep Rock Galactic design and attitude, offers a new key gameplay element in the form of digging/mining/tunneling and it carries through with the content updates it's gotten that have nicely padded up replayability.

Foreword of caution: right now it's early days after release - this game has been previously released on multiple other and was recently ported to Steam with improvements for PC gameplay (like wide-screen support, etc.). During the week and some after release there are multiple technical issues arising on Discord support channel and the team is working on them. It is my estimate as player and gamedev there may be something limiting the current/initial speed of their work (could be part of the team is on vacation after a busy release, could be anything), but I don't judge - I wish them best of luck on now stabilizing and polishing this otherwise great game!

Other than the the few issues I've run into with my friends playing in private online co-op (a couple of soft-locks that didn't lose us any rewards, a couple times one of three players had some item unlock issues and we had to change host to fix it) the game is radical, dude! Hades-style action roguelike with the Turtles and all that it entails - there's a few branches of permanent progression systems that unlock after you play and progress further (or fail enough times, and various other conditions), and the during-run progression of Turtle Powers, Masteries, Tools, Max Health and the during-run resource management of your health (roguelite style, your health tracks as you progress from room to room, so taking hits early limits your chances towards the end) and Scrap. Scrap is used at interval of a few rooms as you're given a chance to purchase from a random selection of items like healing, max health, Turtle Powers, etc. Turtle Powers are always offered as a black box where you only know what element/type of Turtle Power you're getting, and only when you commit to the choice you'll see a random selection of powers within that category. Masteries are like Turtle Powers in that both offer you some new ability like a limited shield, incremental bonuses to stuff like max health or damage of specific attacks or all damage, etc., but Masteries are much stronger and found less often. There's a fair amount of possible synergies across different Powers and Tools, and each Turtle has a couple of their personal traits they begin with (sometimes you're given the chance to pick one of some other Turtle's characteristic/personal traits).

The online multiplayer works well if you have good latency (me and my friends play in Northern Europe, no problems here) and we've all agreed so far that the game's good fun just chatting and smashing our way through for the fun and pretty relaxed gameplay (some fights offer fair challenges, but the overall loop is nice and it's very relaxing to embrace that defeat is just another way towards progress as you get your rewards and shop for permanent progression perks).

I have no regrets for my purchase and am certain to keep playing with my friends as soon as I hear on the Discord that some patch note mentions they've taken care of the gnarliest possible progression resetting bug, so we'll hold off for a bit just now. Maybe I'll order a pizza when it's time to put our surfs up again.

Absolutely my game of the year right at the start of the year on its release, barring anything unanticipated, weird and shady - as-is the game has very good mechanics, visuals, the gameplay feel rocks, it's very fun with friends and on top of it all the live service model is breaking the usual molds in best of ways, making it a much more player-friendly time- and money-wise.

A pretty heartfelt little game the size of a bigger game. More than I expected from an April Fool's joke!