#languages (mostly spanish french and japanese. it's like. barebones)

[blown-to-kingdom-come]

girl i spent like an hour brainstorming a qsmp oc

[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.