#astrea six-sided oracles

[so-and-sos-blog]

I’ve been playing a lot of roguelike deckbuilders. They’re really fun, but the problem I always have with engine-builders is that I want to have the engine. They’re engine-builders, not engine-havers. The engine gets thrown out once the run is over, win or lose. And I don’t just mean “I want the games to be longer so I can play with my engine more before throwing it out”, like an endless mode. I mean I want to put that engine in my garage so I can take it for a spin every now and then whenever I feel like it. I want a whole parking lot full of shiny game-winning engines, and I want to keep getting new ones and keep playing with the vintage ones.

I want the variety and replayability of a roguelike engine-builder, but not the impermanence of “hooray, you won, now just throw out that cool engine you built and we’ll pretend that never happened”.

[vidityavoleti]

i can't tell if i'm being mean but this description of dice is destroying me lmao

[transdragonlira]

I don't often say that you need to play any specific game, everyone has their own preferences and I get that. That being said. You NEED to check out Astrea: Six sided oracles.

FIRST OF ALL, JUST LOOK AT THIS SNIPPET FROM THE STEAM BANNER

The game is GORGEOUS, and I don't mean in a "this game has good graphics" NO I MEAN AS IN THE ARTSTYLE IS JUST STRAIGHT UP BEAUTIFUL. It's a visual experience like I have never seen before.

But what's even better than the artstyle, is the gameplay. Good lord the gameplay is fantastic. Everything feels like it works together perfectly. And when I say everything, I mean everything. From the dice, the artsyle, the story, your virtues, your health, the enemies' health, your blessings, your sentinels- everything feels in sync with eachother. The sheer amount of synergies you can discover feel endless. (I'm personally a huge fan of the virtue system- making a 'bad' or an 'unlucky' roll still have a significant purpose in your game plan is some genius game design)

Every turn matters. Every turn is a matter of life and death, a good turn is good, but a bad turn can be outright DISASTEROUS. This game WILL have you sitting on the egde of your seat constantly. Every turn is a puzzle to be solved, and every run is a combination of carefully (or not so carefully) picked out dice, with many paths to victory.

Like so many masterpieces of games, the game is easy to learn, but has so much dept to explore that I don't think I'll ever truly master it.

Look. I put 5 hours in the free demo which only includes the first area and only a handful of dice, virtues and characters. This game is gonna get hundreds of hours put into by me. There's a lot to say about the game, but frankly- none of it is enough to encapsulate the full experience. If you're not sold immediatly, you can try the demo first, it has plently of content to get you hooked

NOW GO PLAY IT, IT'S 10% OFF FOR THE LAUNCH! YOU WILL NOT REGRET IT

[burnazog]

the funny dice game cometh very funny that the first character is blue mana shenanigans

[fancypantsrecords]

Various Artists - Sounds Of Summer 2022 | Black Screen Records | 2022 | Black

[syvisvt]

It is time!

#AstreaDiceGame Calls!

Join in as we explore the full release of this dice builder I have been itching to play!

My bio shall lead you!

[blueberry-lemon]

Love this game so far. Just got my first win.

I love Slay the Spire and it taught me everything I needed to learn about deckbuilders, but I think this game, Monster Train, and Touhou Lost Branch of Legend have surpassed it as my favorites.

[hardcoregamer]

The Top Ten Games of PAX East 2023

PAX East 2023 ended a couple of days ago, and while it suffered a bit to the still-lingering specter of COVID and the unfortunate timing of being held at the same time as GDC, this year’s event felt like a grand return to form. While there are still  notable absences that were felt (still hoping for that Indie Megabooth comeback), there was an incredible amount of amazing games to be seen, and so like with PAX West 2022 last year, we wanted to celebrate by once again picking our ten favorite games from the show.

Check them out!

[filipmagnuswrites]

Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles Game Review - The Best Dice Deckbuilder Roguelike Yet

Give a man a card game and he’ll log thirty hours into it without a second thought. Give a man a dice game, and watch him go progressively wonkier as he is forced to remember six different types of dice mechanics, one for each of the six characters you can unlock while playing Astrea: Six-Sided Oracle. That man is me. You know, in case it wasn’t obvious. I’ve put eleven hours into Astrea and…

[birdsinvideogames]

Game: Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles

Bird: Moonie the Owl

Hello and welcome! The first bird to be rated here is Moonie, and she's a cutie! With a sweet little face and a trans flag color palette, how could you not love her?!

Rating: 10/10

[solrin]

Astrea VOD #3

Hot damn do I love me some RNG based characters

[casuallyyoa]

ASTREA: SIX-SIDED ORACLE IMPRESSIONS

WHAT

Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles is a new roguelike from Little Leo Games, launched 21st September 2023 (22nd, for those of me in a different timezone). I’ve tried out the demo before, calling it something I’d prioritize among the many, many other games out there. Well, now that it’s out, it’s time for the Casual Impressions.

SETTINGS

The options menu is fairly spartan, but the game doesn’t have that much you really need to tweak anyway.

You have your audio sliders, barebones graphics presets, the ability to change battle speed up to ultra fast, skipping certain animations, a run timer toggle, controls between mouse and controller / keyboard, and miscellaneous options for screenshake, particle effects and data collection. 

Data collection is to send the devs gameplay data and error logs to assist in game balance and does not include personal identifying information. If you’re still concerned, you can turn it off regardless.

Text languages available are:

English

Brazilian Portuguese 

Simple / Traditional Chinese

French

German

Japanese

Korean

Russian

Spanish

While the Ultra battle speed sounds handy for maybe speedrunning and such, it doesn’t seem to affect the actual dice roll animations which while nice, is probably something you might want to skip when it comes to rushing through. 

Since I use the mouse, right-click is for viewing a die’s face. Maybe there could be a toggle for quick use when it comes to area of effect dice.

PRESENTATION

Astrea is mostly in this gorgeous blue, purple and gold trim colour palette. It quite reminds me of tarot, as you lay out the cloth and prepare your cards for a reading. The dice aside, the blessings you can get look like metal pins you could buy off Etsy - and could totally make for some kickass limited edition merchandise, if you get my drift.

The Oracles and the purifying they do are blue, while the corruption is in red. The corruption can morph pretty much anything into terrifying, dangerous entities; if they are sentient beings, they scurry off to the right side of the screen once you help them regain their senses.

I do wonder how much being colourblind can affect someone when it comes to playing this game. We can take visual clarity for granted sometimes.

GAMEPLAY

Gameplay wise, Astrea has not changed drastically from the demo. You have your dice with all their faces of effects that make up your deck. ‘Safe’ dice usually don’t have the biggest numbers, but you’re at least assured you wouldn’t roll something that could be devastating, unlike ‘Risky’ dice which generally have bombastic effects, both good and bad. Mostly bad?

With your dice in hand, you proceed from node to node, picking up more dice options, finding encounters, and what have you. You can have up to two Sentinels, your support buddies offering more dice to complement your chosen character’s playstyle. Their HP is pretty low and don’t all get the ability to attack, so they’re not the most reliable helpers if they don’t have the spread of dice you want.

You will need to balance between Purifying and Corruption, more so if you’re picking out risky dice. You can inflict Corruption on yourself to activate your spread of Virtues - the row of icons above your health bar - but too much, and you’d accidentally lose one of your lives. 

You can’t throw all the Corruption onto the enemies either; it will heal them and trigger Overcorruption abilities once they reach the threshold to immediately perform an action you probably would rather avoid. That’s not forgetting any potential passive effects they have. The least you can do is hover over the smaller icons and read up on what they do.

Once you’ve cleared a single run with a given Oracle, you can start ramping up the difficulty via Anomaly levels a la something like Slay the Spire’s Ascension. You will want to try out all the characters to level them up to unlock even more things for later runs, as you might expect.

One thing I found a little odd was that there wasn’t an Abandon Run option right now. As it happens, forfeiting a run means you don’t get any experience towards levelling up that character. So even if you’re in a run you feel is hopeless, you need to keep on going anyway otherwise you make no progress. I would have thought games like these usually give a nominal amount towards unlocks, but different games, different systems.

CONCLUSION

Well, is it much of a surprise I really like this game following from the demo? It’s pretty simple to grasp, though of course it won’t prevent me from yelling at unfavourable rerolls. I wanted to work on a 'review' once I managed to complete a run with a character which happened a little sooner than I thought, so there’s certainly more to be had. As it is, I already liked it, so Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles is a Highly Recommended.  

[failbettergames]

any games you'd recommend? could be for any reason! (similarity to fallen london, you know the people who made it, you just think it's neat, etc.) besides your own, of course, I already own all of those :)

Yes, here's a list of all of the games we talked about in our newsletter last year:

Birth: an adventure puzzle game about constructing a creature from spare bones & organs.

Scarlet Hollow: an immersive, episodic horror-mystery.

Egypt: Old Kingdom: a strategy simulator of the Great Pyramids period.

The Past Within is a fun, eerie way to spend an hour with a friend.

The Pale Beyond: high stakes on the frozen wastes, Sunless Sea feelings. 

King of the Castle: medieval monarch party game.

Stray Gods: an urban fantasy, musical visual novel featuring the gods of Greek myth.

Vampire Survivors: so moreish.

Knotwords: extremely satisfying crossword-anagram-puzzle game.

The Banished Vault: so gorgeous it actually makes us a bit cross.

Astronaut the Best: an anarchic comedy about assembling a team of hapless astronauts. 

El Paso, Elsewhere: supernatural neo-noir shooter, in which you must destroy the villain you loved - even if it means dying yourself.

Thank Goodness You're Here: may be the only game that’s more British than the ones we make.

The Fabulous Fear Machine: pulpy horror narrative strategy.

WORLD OF HORROR: Junji Ito-adjacent roguelike.

Lies of P: tickles your Fromsoft fancy. 

The Lamplighters League: essentially 1930s supernatural XCOM 

Tails Noir (formerly known as Backbone): gorgeous, bleak, compelling and unsatisfying in equal measure. 

Mediterrea Inferno: a spicy story about finding yourself after isolation.

DotAGE: manage a village where the Village Elder has helpfully precise visions of the future.

Slay the Princess: the princess is very bad and you have to kill her. 

VR remake of The 7th Guest: very fun, silly and far less punishing than the original. 

Astrea: Six-sided Oracles: interesting dice-and-deckbuilding system. 

Return of the Obra Dinn: truly a modern classic.

[sexhaver]

i might make a longer post about the game as a whole later but ive been really digging Cobalt Core recently. everyone and their dog knows that there's no point in releasing a roguelite deckbuilder unless you're improving on Slay the Spire, and Cobalt Core is the first one to come out since 2017 that really nails it without feeling derivative. the combat system is engaging and most importantly DIFFERENT than STS (Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles is unique enough to come close but at the end of the day it really does feel like STS with dice instead of cards).

anyways. the reason i made this post is because it absolutely fucking blows STS out of the water on soundtrack alone. like im almost sad this is the Act 2 boss track because that means you only hear it once per run

[that-house]

Half of my waking hours in the last day have been spent playing Astrea: Six Sided Oracles

[lilyblackdrawside]

I play a lot of Slay the Spire. Like, a lot a lot. I like this kind of game in general. Played a bunch of Monster Train too. Recently I found Astrea - Six-Sided Oracles and Lost Branch of Legend. Astrea revolves around dice, so it's a bit different, but the structure and sensibilities are the same, while LBoL feels like a very high effort StS mod.

They're both good games, but ultimately I "went back" to StS, in that when I think of playing either, I just play that game instead.

Long post.

With Astrea the reason is easy: It's dice. Dice are fine, but I like cards. Astrea also tends to kinda feel samey and I don't really like playing half of the characters. With StS I like playing all four of the characters.

But why is it that I'm not that into LBoL? It's Touhou, it's really pretty, it's StS - I should like this.

I even really like the main thing differentiating this game from StS: The mana system. In short, it has MtG style mana, which allows for card costs to be a lot more granular than 0, 1, 2, 3 (4+) and makes for interesting balancing. This is that game's strongest point.

But similar to Astrea, when I start up the game I find myself struggling to pick a character to play, not because I like all of them, but because I don't. Reimu is boring and cumbersome, Sakuya is always "My hand is full" (Which just feels bad. I should have to work to see this happening, but with Sakuya it's just the default state of being), Cirno is clunky and just has the most awful time at the start of the game and then there's Marisa.

My eternal saviour, Marisa. She's the only fun character - and only half of her, truly. One half of hers is reminiscent of a Marisa character mod for StS where you build "Charge" with certain cards and when it reaches a threshold you go into Powered Up mode where you do more damage for the rest of the turn. It's a very ebb and flow kinda gameplay and once you've built your deck enough to get it going does feel nice.

Her other half is potions. You use cards that shuffle potions into your deck that when drawn hit a random enemy for decent damage, create 1 all-colour mana and draw a card. You have to put in an up-front investment with all these potion cards to then get an explosive turn or two later. It feels really nice when you've stacked your deck with potions, helped it out with some scrying to then watch them all go. This is the most enjoyable character in the game. I do also enjoy playing Sakuya, because she has some similar combos going but unlike Marisa, her knives that are similar to those potions, stick in your hand, leading to "My hand is full".

But if it was just that, so what. I can still get a fun run out of Reimu or Cirno as well, it'd be fine.

No, what bothers me is that two of three Act 3 bosses suck ass and the True Ending boss also sucks ass most of the time in just the least fun ways.

The Act 3 bosses are Sanae, who emulates The Awoken by gaining power from you playing this game's Power analogues, Remilia who is just Time Eater (which is the only bad part of StS. If you want to make an StS-like game DO NOT PUT TIME EATER INTO IT) and Junko, who turns your coloured mana into colourless mana.

Sanae is fine. She just hits you, heals herself a bit, drains your Strength and Dex and gets stronger if you play a certain card type. All of this is just fine.

Junko can just suck so much. Obviously you need coloured mana, but some decks can handle having less of it. Some decks aren't even affected by her trait at all, because she can't uncolour all-colour mana. That stuff's just immune, so if your deck happens to produce a lot of that, you're good. (Potion Marisa does this)

Remilia is Time Eater. This is especially egregious because there is another boss in Act 1 who punishes you for playing too many cards and that is Sakuya: She just punches you in the face every so often but that's it. You can implement a punishment mechanic for spammy decks, you don't have to forcefully end my turn! Just drop my stats, deal damage, force a discard or two or drain some of my mana there are so many ways to go about it that aren't "Oh let's just make Time Eater again." Everybody hates Time Eater!

And then there's Seija, as the True Final Boss. She comes in with the classic The Heart trait of only taking up to 300 damage per turn, this is fine. It's boring, but it's fine. I get it, you don't want her to get FTK'd as well as hitting you for 1 damage for each card played (another fine way of punishing spammy decks). Aside from that, she also gets several effects based on artifacts she picks at random. I will only go over the three that she can pick from for her first one, because the problematic one is right there:

Teapot with Long Spout: Suffer either 3 Weak, Frail or Vulnerable each turn. This is fine. Get some debuffs, sure.

Pendant that emits evil spirits: Seija summons some trash mobs every turn. This is fine. You should be able to handle small stuff by now.

Overdecorated Gold Cup: Lose all non-Shining, non-Mythic Rare exhibits.

Exhibits are Relics. Shining Exhibits govern your mana base. You start with one based on your character and get another after each boss. Mythic Rare Exhibits are a special type that you can start with in a special help-mode. You don't get these in normal gameplay.

So this just sucks. It's not fun. Even if your deck doesn't rely on your relics, it's just dumb. Having relics is fun but now you don't get to play with them anymore. And what if you do rely on them? What if you got the Shuriken-analogue at the start of the run and built your entire deck around it? Now you're stuck throwing rubber knives at Seija. Countless other such cases. This would be fine on like an Act 2 boss.

With the Act 3 boss, you do get some advance notice either way by virtue of having the entire third act to "prepare" for it, but if it's Remi and you're already a combo deck you're not getting off that. You can reasonably pick up some cards that are less heavy on coloured mana or that produce all-colour mana to help with Junko though.

with Seija you only know what she picks when she picks it.

There is a random event where you can get info on which Act 3 boss you'll fight or what Seija's first item will be. You can pick either or, but you also have to get the event in the first place.

But even if you pick to scout Seija and learn that she gets the Cup, what are you going to do about it? Not grab relics anymore? You can probably handle it, but you know it won't be an enjoyable fight.

The way to open the path to Seija's fight isn't even difficult. You just have to pick the correct option at three certain nodes that you're forced to pass through anyway, but I never want to do it because there's a 1 in 3 chance that the fight is going to be unfun.

There are other annoying encounters too, such as the two lunar rabbits who are "regular enemies" and will just end your run if you have no multi-hit attacks, but all that is fine. I'll slug through a sucky Act 1 boss, who gives a shit it's Act 1. What I don't like is how there's always a good chance for the final boss to not be fun.