Recent reviews by Xelaadryth

Tl;dr appealing to strategy board game players, but unfortunately balanced around RTS players. A lot of fun on the default difficulty for a run or two if you perma-pause, but is wildly imbalanced and becomes too easy, and the only other difficulty options disable pause and forces you to throw away the fun parts of the game.

EDIT: With the upcoming Memories update, will need to update this review, but very satisfied with their response and approach to adjusting the game to suit their fanbase.

As a turn-based strategy board game player that's not a fan of RTS:
Fun: 9/10
Controls: 5/10
Visuals: 9/10
Sound: 7/10
Story: 4/10
Difficulty: 4/10 (typical standard game), 7/10 (all content on standard)
Replayability: 2/10
Value: 2/10
Dev Response: 9/10

This game has a heapload of potential and honestly I really adore it and want it to succeed. This game is a cute worker placement game that forces you to make decisions and adapt to situations.

A lot of strategic depth is in the placement of your buildings; in the beginning you need to plan out how to situate your production buildings such that they can both get efficiency boosts from adjacency, while also planning out where your heat generators will be since everything out of their range will be unusable for 50% of your time in the game (or until you advance further in the tech tree). These early decisions are critical because resources are extremely scarce at the start, and every bit of efficiency you can eke out is important.

The resources you balance are literal resources, such as wood, stone, iron, and herbs, in addition to time and dice durability. Every time you place a worker, it takes a certain amount of seconds to complete its job to generate more resource. After usage, a die needs to be rerolled in order to be placed again. Each roll of a die consumes a durability point of the max 16. A die can only be placed on a tile if it matches the tile's requirement, for instance a forest tile requires a "gather" die face. In addition to rerolling after usage, you will often have to decide whether to save a die for later, wasting time not using it, or rerolling it repeatedly right away at the cost of durability to get the face you need right now.

Dice also have colors, or classes, and while most classes share some default faces, each class has a unique face too, so you'll need to branch out if you want to adapt to the map you're given and optimize resource usage.

Interesting decisions:
- Tile placement
- Class distribution
- Upgrading for late game
- Technology tree specialization

However, the one critical flaw; at higher difficulties you cannot pause. Everything I said above is assuming that you pause the game every time you need to think about a decision. Without the ability to pause, strategy gets thrown out the window, and the game's design instead rewards APM and reflexes, completely avoiding the parts of the game that are most interesting and appealing, and focused instead on how many foolish mistakes you make because you're pressed for time.

To add insult to injury, as dice return to your pool as they complete tasks, if they ever exceed the max pool size of 12, you have to choose which will perish. And to throw salt on that wound, the class of dice won't be happy about that, so the game just attempts to punish you for playing the most interesting and strategic way.

The game's controls aren't centered around pausing, so most actions can only be taken while unpaused. Because of this, you have to awkwardly pause and unpause almost every second. You also feel guilty for not playing the game how it was designed, but dang is it fun.

At least for awhile. While the game is challenging at first, it quickly becomes trivially easy as the game doesn't expect you to have the almost infinite APM you get from pausing, and the end of the game is almost the same difficulty as the beginning, except now you have a lot more resources at your disposal to win.

The end of each game is also anticlimactic, as you just throw out all the strategy and class structure you had in the beginning to just get as many sword symbols as you can to end the game.

I've played the game for more than 13 hours these last two days but I'm running out of content because the game isn't designed for this mode of gameplay that I find extremely fun.

EDIT: After playing for 40 hours, I've cleared all content in the game, including some interesting secret content that hadn't been discovered at the initial time of writing. Was very very cool to figure it out for myself, but soon there will be guides for it everywhere. At this point I'm done with the game, as while it was fun to clear the content, it still felt anticlimactic and did not add any replay value to the game.

If I could adjust the design direction of the game, I would recommend a separate turn-based strategy mode that brings out the best and most fun parts of strategic worker placement games, since I have zero interest in the RTS approach. Specifically:
- automatically pause whenever dice return to your pool
- don't restrict the actions you can take while paused
- don't limit the amount of dice you can have in your active pool; perhaps use some other system to limit population cap per class, such as housing or unemployment unhappiness, since you can always just throw dice that you don't want to use into unused buildings anyway

There's also a lot of potential for meta-game advancement other than ascended dice, for instance a meta-game unlock tree that unlocks portions of the in-game tech tree, or increases starting dice, or increases max numbers on ascended dice, while also providing levels of appropriately scaling difficulty and complexity. The new first level could be extremely simple and beatable with 3 peasant swords in minutes without needing any other class, easing you in and letting you feel wonder as you unlock access to civilian dice and tech tree for the first time, while later on the maps would become incredibly challenging as it scales to expect you to have beefy ascended dice.

Overall I love the game but can't recommend it in its present state. Due to its lack of replayability (for someone like me anyway) and lack of meta-game progression systems, while polished, I can't say it justifies it's $20 price tag.

EDIT: After figuring out the secret content and clearing it and dropping 40 hours into the game, at this point I might say it was worth the $20 if the struggle to clear it was a bit less frustrating. I think most of the fun was in feeling like I was one of the first to figure everything out and clear it, but once there are guides out I expect that the experience would be more frustrating than fun, and I probably would've preferred to just watch a video of someone else clearing it just to see what would happen. 40 hour game for $20 is a bit more palatable though, but I probably still won't recommend it as it still leaves me wanting.

If a game designer makes these changes and additions though, I think the game could really be truly amazing, and much more fun, charming, and strategically deep than similar survival city builders.