Thea: The Awakening

With multiple ways to achieve victory and countless strategies to employ, Thea: The Awakening is designed to occupy your time for countless hours. A single playthrough can last hundreds of turns but once you’ve earned a victory, it will simply unlock new quests and options. The complexity leads to all sorts of different ways you can enjoy your time but also creates a gigantic barrier to entry. Without watching a YouTube video of a playthrough being completed and explained on the fly I may have just given up, which would have been a shame because Thea is a fantastic title worth spending the time to figure out.

An incredibly addictive gameplay experience that ropes you in, dazzling you with its unique world and storytelling, that you will quickly lose sleep over.

There's a lot of good in Thea: The Awakening. Nearly every bit of text is voiced, it's cool being able to grow your group of people, handling combat head-on or simply selecting to auto-resolve is implemented well, and there's a great deal of customization. However, it's rather short with only a single primary objective and there's no substantial reason to replay it.

Thea: The Awakening brings the background to less covered topics, with the Slavic mythology acting as the overarching theme instead of the cliché Norse or medieval settings, and that's something to praise. What Thea doesn't get right is that by trying to be too many things at the same time, it doesn't quite succeed at any of them and the result is a game that while not without its value, often feels too overloaded, with mechanics that trample each other. Nonetheless, Thea still has something going for it, it just doesn't fully materialize.

Never mind the fact that Thea: The Awakening can frequently feel like a needlessly complicated 4X stategy/survival rogue-like/card battler. If that was its only issue, this would be an easy recommendation. Regrettably, the inconvenience that is its user interface mars what could be something really awesome.