Thea: The Awakening

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

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.

With a game that employs multiple means of victory through strategy, great focus on Slavic mythology and a beautiful map peppered with resources, bodies of water and forests, Thea: The Awakening will really surprise you. For fans of simulation titles with a sweet mix of RPG elements, Thea is an easy recommendation as there is very little on the Switch that even compares in the genre.

Despite its disappointing combat system and its missed opportunity for providing a more engaging story, Thea: The Awakening still manages to be a riveting game that’ll keep you hooked for hours.

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.

Thea: The Awakening isn’t a bad game, but it’s hard to recommend. Those looking for a tough survival game could do better, yet they could find some enjoyment in it. The highs, though few and far between, did provide a sense of accomplishment when there was actual difficulty behind them. However, the anger and lack of joy found in the defeat, with restarting being almost the only option, is enough to turn off a lot of people.

Thea: The Awakening wants to be many things. It wants to be a proper 4X game; it wants to be a through-and-through survival experience; it wants to be an RPG, a CCG and many other genres all at once. It succeeds at some, but often at the expense of others. There are some really great ideas here – the almost Pratchett-esque silliness to some of its scenarios and the focus on Slavic myths serves as a striking source of inspiration – but the focus on micro-management busywork simply gets in the way of the empire-building fun Thea should really be embracing.