OK, let's get this out of the way right now.

You will die.

Lots.

You will be poisoned, diseased, irradiated, blown up, and electrocuted. You will be hungry and starved, your equipment will break, your armor will fail, and your ammunition will run dry. You will be stunned, confused, blinded, and terrorized. You will be shot by crazed security robots, shredded by mutated terrors, and gnawed on by countless foes, and occasionally disintegrated.

...so, you've got that going for you.


Overview (what is it?):

Sword of the Stars: The Pit is a turn-based top-down roguelike, where you play a character exploring a hostile and ancient alien complex trying to find the cure for a plague that is running rampant through the worlds.

Gameplay:

Well, for those unfamiliar with roguelikes - this game is not meant to be beaten in a few hours then discarded. As my introduction stated, this is a challenging game, with permanent death (the game mechanics prevent you from saving, except to exit the game) and you can only have one active game per character class at once, so you'll frequently watch as a character you've invested hours of gameplay into is wiped out or overwhelmed. Because the game is randomly generated each time, sometimes bad luck will end a good run with not much you can do about it. Your character has several limiting factors to keep in mind - ammunition is limited, and can only be replenished by finding more (which, depending on the weapon, may not be that common). Food is a concern as well, as there is a hunger mechanism that makes starving a real possibility if you can't find or make enough food to stay alive. Disease is a concern - not just from infected creatures, but perhaps by being forced to eat things you shouldn't... And, of course, there's just running out of hit points and dying at the hands of the denizens of the complex!

Gameplay itself is turn based, with you and monsters alternating turns (though, if no monsters are visible or present, your turns run seamlessly together making it easy to move around). each turn you have a limited number of movement points to move around the grid squares and explore the complex, looking for abandoned equipment you can scavenge or repair, old lockers that might contain food or items you could use - and, of course, creatures that may still be lurking! Somewhere on each level is a hatch leading to the next level below, with monsters getting tougher as you descend.

The interface is a nice balance of being easy to get used to, though does take a quick reference of the manual to learn some of the finer points. generally, you move with the awsd keys, and use the space bar to interact with objects you face. 'Interact' is case sensitive; for a locker or a freezer, it'll be 'open', a locked vault will be 'unlock', a broken piece of equipment will be 'repair', etc. Combat is similarly simple - equip the weapon you'd like (or select from available hotkeys), and click on the target. (And, yes, there is a good tutorial available to teach you all this stuff!)

Overall, though the game itself is simple, I found (and still find!) it interesting because some of the choices the gameplay provides. I'm hungry - do I dare risk eating my tainted meat, or press a little further in hopes of finding something more suitable? The room ahead is heavily guarded - is it worth the ammunition I'll use (and wounds I'll take!) to clear it in hopes of finding equipment I can use, or should I bypass it? My inventory is full - do I drop some of the parts I'm carrying in hopes of building something useful down the line, or sacrifice some of my limited food, ammo, or extra weapons?

Crafting:

Since I mentioned it above, a note on crafting. As you explore, you will find recipes and blueprints (or, sometimes, discover them yourself) that allow you to combine items you find to create new items. Some of these are intuitive (cook raw meat to make cooked meat. Combine certain meat with bread to make a sandwich, etc.) but the crafting system is very involved, to the point of being able to craft for yourself armor, weapons, and equipment that will drastically improve your chances for survival. How involved? Well, I'm several HUNDRED hours into the gameplay, and still am constantly finding new clues and recipes... it's certainly a rich and rewarding ara to explore -though sometimes frustrating, as the random nature of the game means you may have a great blueprint, but be short of a needed item to build what you want, and unable to find said item (or, worse sometimes, have all the items you need, but lack a workstation to assemble it!) The limited inventory space means you can't simply carry everything - you have to decide what is important to you, which again leads to some interesting choices sometimes. Anyway, know that crafting is very important in this game, and there's much to discover here!

(Also, note that I play The Pit with several DLC installed; this does add some to the crafting, but to be fair, I don't think I'm close to finding all the recipes from the original game yet!)



Characters:

Your first choice when you begin a game is which character you'd like to play. The original game provides three options - a marine, who is very capable in combat but lacking in the finesse and scientific skills; an engineer who has lots of technical know-how but limited combat effectiveness; or a scout - a sort of jack-of-all-trades character, a mix of some finesse and technical skills combined with some light combat skills as well.

Available DLC (downloadable content) allows you to broaden this class list: Mind Games adds psionic powers to the game and allows you to play as a human Scion or an alien Tarka Ranger, and the Gold expansion adds four more (three immediately and one unlockable) characters.

I won't go into too much character detail here - the info is out there if you choose, but suffice it to say that each character has strengths and weaknesses, different starting equipment and skills, as well as a personal backstory for why the character is descending into The Pit.

And the choices you make are very relevant, too - for example, the marine excels at combat, so you'd think he'd be easy to play, as monsters don't really scare him. However, his lack of foraging skills mean he's more likely to go hungry from not finding food, and he may run out of ammo faster from not being able to find more - plus his limited science skills mean he's less able to craft new equipment for himself.

Overall, most of the classes are well balanced - there's one I find to be a touch overpowered, and a couple I don't play because they don't fit my playstyle (one in particular seems a little weak) but with this much to choose from it seems to me that the average player is going to find at least a couple they really enjoy.

Character Advancement:

Your character has four attributes (might, finesse, brains, and power) that you can increase as you advance, as well as various skills. Skills include weapons skills (pistol, rifle, blade, to name a few) and equally important non-combat skills (foraging, lockpicking, psionic skills, decipher, electronics, etc). The basic game has something like 20 skill areas available to your character, and the mindgame expansion adds five more (five different psionic skills) for a total of 25. Each time you gain a level, you're given a number of skill points (dependant on character class) to assign. Again, it comes down to choice - you can't be good at everything, so what's important to you? Skills will level with use to a certain point - but to be really good takes some added skill points.

Your character also has various other values (hit points, armor, etc) that are fairly self-evident, but I do want to make note of the hunger mechanism. Each character has a 'food' bar, similar to a life/hit points bar- eat some food, this goes up to a certain maximum.

I wanted to love this game. I really did. I've put in my time (nearly 40 hours, according to Steam), but I just cannot find myself recommending this game. I love the setting (sci-fi roguelikes are notably scarce), and they've got interesting character choices, especially with the DLC installed, pulling from the SotS galaxy and lore.

However, in the end, the game's just too hard. And not hard in a satisfying way. Hard in a grindingly slow, agonizingly limping way that eventually will find your character naked with all his weapons broken or out of ammo, bleeding fists beating hopelessly against the uncaring steel chassis of a battle drone that's blowing holes in you. It's been the sad fate of literally every character I've tried, even on easy difficulty.

What it boils down to is that the game, in its debatable wisdom, decided that everything should have durability. Then the game decided that whenever you fix something, its maximum durability would be decreased. So far, so good - I suppose I could see the logic in wanting to force characters to have to keep upgrading their equipment. Except that's not what happens. What happens is that, due to a lack of getting the right crafting materials (or, very rarely, getting the stuff you need, but never finding a crafting station), or getting the wrong drops (nope, that's HEAVY armor, you can only wear LIGHT armor... or worse, you're a space dolphin - you can't wear 99% of armor, period), or not getting any drops at all; everything breaks.

Even the most promising characters can be lost because you weren't able to find any ammunition that fits in any of your guns for 3 or 4 floors running. Or because you ran into one-too-many acid beasts, and now all your equipment is broken.

There's something fundamentally wrong with a game where one of the basic tips for new players is to take off all your weapons and armor and punch the beginning monsters to death, because otherwise your ♥♥♥♥ will break before you can find enough equipment to have any chance of winning at all.

An utterly compelling turn-based gem. I've never been one for Roguelikes, albeit content with minimalist graphics, ASCII lies beyond my tolerance, so I'm fairly new to the genre. Also, being a compulsive cleptomaniac in RPGs, permadeath and losing all my gleefully scavenged goodies has never been a positive factor. However, this has gripped me. Starting out is a little grindy, as you must unlock vital crafting recipes (i'd recommend the wiki) to really stand a chance at not starving to death early on. However, due to heavy randomisation, progress can hinge on redundant plans and experience is required to know how you can adapt.

The more you play, the more you learn and damn, is there much to learn as you desperately try to manage your equipment and potentially useful crafting items to survive another floor. Utterly brutal, but brilliant. Highly recommended, though not a short affair like FTL (even pre-DLC) and thus quite the voracious time-vampire, should you befall to it's charms.

Hands down my favorite rogue-like on steam. ( I <3 U 2 FTL )
I've put in over 125 hours of starvation, ammo depletion, broken equipment and death and death and death. I love it and I still have yet to get close to beating this game. Not only did the game start with a crazy amount of resources, recipes, weapons, monsters and skills, but they kept adding to it! New characters, psi abilities more recipes and monsters. What do I do will all this random junk in my backpack, everything can be used to craft something new. And on top of that it has a great Sci-Fi dungeon crawl feel. Starving, saving your laser ammo until your skills are up and worrying if your combat knife is going to break on the next attack. The greatest game I've never beat!

I would encourage more kids to play as it is an entertaining critical thinking/time & resource management challenge… vs learning how to call strangers piles of sticks online in COD-ish games.

Pros:
+ 30-40 Floors of randomized obstacles turn base RPG (depending on DLC purchased)
+ Every DLC adds not just a character but improves upon existing game mechanic – so not money grabs but adds value to WHOLE game – worth getting even if you don’t want new chars IMHO.
+ Dungeons of Dredmor like turn based combat, so great for alt-tab, pick me up anytime game
+ Need to manage, inventory/resources in Deus EX 1 like inventory grid.
+ Different enemies/traps that require different tactics, weapons and approaches.
+ Tons of loot and craft able weapons, armors, gadgets – ***Google sword of the stars the pit Wiki for an idea. but it contains spoilers**
+ Tons of different skills to focus on, so different characters have different playstyles (Not exactly like SPECIAL/perk system from fallout series but uniquely good)
+ 3-8ish different classes with different skills/equipment load out
+Decent voice/music/sound acting (I actually really love the soundtrack though!)


Cons:
-Dated graphics (but pro if you’re into that like I am)
-Difficult learning curve, can understand why some players get turned off by this (pro if you like a challenge that requires adapting)
-Player won’t have idea of what items/tactics necessary for successful runs (but seems to be part of the game design of learning via failures etc.)
-Will have to play multiple times to unlock certain recipes to craft important (but not game required) items. Can cheat with wiki but normal way to unlock is to just play a lot as recpies are unlocked via skill checks at consoles
-Lack of a storyline – it’s there but in the form of lore/messages obtained from consoles (which also is the only way to learn recipes (sans wiki)
-1 Save per class picked, max 5 slots.. but only as game progress save (sorry no save scumming!)

WHAT TO EXPECT: Indie title.Traditional roguelike playstyle. Replete with features and content. Procedurally generation levels. Strong RPG elements and elements. Sci-fi themed from a unique universe. Require planning and strategy. Turn-based, grid movement and tactical combat. Large menu of unlockable crafting recipes. Colourful but basic 2D visual. Very difficult and challenging by nature. Requires resource and inventory management. Perma-death and perma-damage affects stats. RNG rolls can be terrible. Huge replay value. Annoying wormhole trap spamming issue. Single-player. Full controller support.
ACHIEVEMENTS: A MIXED BAG. SOME WILL BE VERY DIFFICULT.
STATUS: COMPLETE.
WHO FOR/WHEN TO BUY: FANS WHO ENJOY VERY CHALLENGING GAMES. ON ANY SALE. ITS MORE THAN WORTH IT.

More info below....

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2719127037
Sword of the Stars - The Pit: Osmium Edition (TPOE) is a compilation of the base game, and two DLCs; the Mind Games and Gold Edition. A sci-fi themed roguelike with a strong traditional style of play. Replete with an assortment of tactical and strategic features and a mammoth amount of content. Set in the universe of the same name it is lore heavy, an aspect that encompasses every morsel of the game. Visuals consist of colourfully cartoon-styled, if basic graphics, with a 2D perspective. A basic soundtrack accompanies some rudimentary but ambience enhancing audio effects.

The player's aim is a simple one - to take a character chosen from 8 starting archetypes through 40 levels of procedurally generated floors. A fog of war obscures the way ahead, concealing a maze of rooms and corridors, along with the odd self-enclosed exterior area. These are revealed through exploration, gadgets or accessing security systems. There are over a dozen or so standardised rooms with their own themed sets of enemies and provisioning systems.

GAMEPLAY
Players navigate by moving from tile to tile, one turn at a time. Grabbing as much useful equipment as possible along the way. Opening or bypassing locked doors, interacting with a wide range of functionally varied systems. Defeating whatever potential pitfalls bar progress. By developing their character's stats and skills. All of which are key to successfully navigate The Pit, to reach the final exit intact.

<Enter wormhole below for more details>

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2716149799
+ Choose to play one of 8 starting characters. (Marine, Engineer, Scout, Psion, Ranger, Warrior, Seeker or Striker).
+ 40x levels of procedurally created rooms and corridors filled with traps, enemies and specific items.
+ Lore heavy setting with exotic and racial elements running through aspects of the game making for a unique experience.
+ Large RPG aspects to character building and customisation. Level up and apply points to 4x stat and 26x skills.
Specialise in finesse, might or brains to determine your overall strategy.
+ Lots of secrets to uncover, from: hidden messages, to crafting recipes and SotS lore. Even a secret character.
+ Combat system with fun, fast-paced gameplay and a wealth of ever changing tactical options.
+ A huge and varied roster of dozens upon dozens of enemies. Each with their own forms of attacks, movement rates and AI pathing.
+ An incredible range of inventory; over 50 weapons and around half-dozen grenades to discover. Plus 100 items of equipment to find or craft and use. Rifles, pistols, swords, spears, knives, flamethrowers, rocket launchers, plasma cannons and alot more.

<Enter wormhole below for more details>

- Can be overly challenging even on Easy for casual players. The game is designed to make the player fail unless they make the most of resources and tactical situations.
- Everything has a consequence. Some are worse than others. Permadeath and perma-damage. Your stats can go down if you fail drastically in some actions.
- Drop tables algorithm can feel overly rigged during some runs. With certain items and weapons seemingly, purposely held back depending on the archetypes, to increase the challenge.
- Unwieldly inventory management with late game progression. Requires baggage runs from previous to next level, in order to transport excess items that cannot be stored in tesseract wells.
- Runs can feel repetitive depending on the archetype, and difficulty chosen. With the behaviour of the drop algorithm being a big factor.
- High chance rolls can fail fairly frequently, at least not as rarely as they should. Wrecking particular runs.
- A few GUI issues with missing tactical info which would otherwise be helpful.

* Five difficulties: Easy to Seriously. With even Easy being a very challenging prospect.
* RNG is fairly balanced and can be mitigated but can cause a lot of frustration and loss of effort, when it fails consistently.
* Ambience enhancing sounds with a simple midi sounding audio tune for a soundtrack. Plus the occasion voice acted phrase for flavour.
* Split route branches are possible on some levels.
* Can only return to a limited number of floors above to use bypassed systems or collect items left behind.
* Complete games can last a long, long time. Fast and quick modes can shorten the time for those who do not have the time. Providing increased XP gain or only 20 floors to beat.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2716073194
The 300h+ of time spent with TPOE has proven to be a wonderfully enjoyable experience. At least for the most part. Tinged with moments of frustration, intermingled with some infuriating times. To the point that for the less hardcore among us, this could prove to be a stumbling block as to whether this is a game worth getting. As a roguelike its features make it stand out in a crowded genre. So to discount it without understanding the full picture, could mean missing out on a well-made and absorbing game. One that possesses a very addictive quality.

QUANTITY & QUALITY
A certain level maturity has been reached when it comes to discussing TPOE. Something that a lot of newly released games do not possess. Even with just two of its DLCs included in this package, it is decked to the rafters with oodles of detailed content. Greater than could possibly be covered in this review. The sheer comprehensiveness of the inventory and skill systems provide an eye-popping selection of choices that allowed for my runs to have a fairly open approach to strategy and tactics.

Anyone who loves to micro-manage a vast inventory of equipment and make the best use of the resources available will find its gameplay mentally stimulating. As they come to juggle ammo and to hope for lockers and other containers, to provide those all vital items when it comes time to open them. It will take a serious investment of time to become intimate with it all. I am still finding the odd item I never came across before even in any of my playthroughs.

<Enter wormhole below for more details>

Despite a number of issues and essentially playing the same game at every level, TPOE is a great roguelike. Its sci-fi setting was unique enough to make it stand out from the crowd. Its stand-out features of procedurally generated levels, massive inventory, lots of craftable items, multi-path skillsets and large roster of enemies ensures a fresh challenge on every floor.

<Enter wormhole below for more details>

Given Steam's restrictions on character limits, you can read the rest of this review by using the link below:
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/TheIrregularGamer/discussions/0/3191364340729202254/

Thank you for reading. | Follow my curator here.

One of my favourite games of all time and a close call for GOTY for me.
This snuck up on me earlier in the year and after I gave the demo a go I was instantly hooked and bought the full game, and subsequent expansions over the course of the year.
With endless replayability, the game is an excellent Rogue-like where your chosen character must traverse through an ever-descending series of floors. The monsters (of which there are so, so many different and unique types) get harder the deeper you go, the loot gets progressively better although is still wonderfully randomised -- sometimes you are cursing your lack of equipment, other times you get lucky. Food is scarce, so you must scavenge to stay alive. You can craft items and food from recipes which you can discover through experimentation or by hacking computer terminals and gradually uncovering pieces of text leading you to the full recipe. This element adds to the replayability as you'll likely learn something new from each run.
The game is brutally hard as you crank up the difficult level, but for those looking for an easier time the Easy setting is much more forgiving.

So yeah, if you like Rogue-likes and want an extremely polished turn-based game with wonderful graphical style, sound and huge replayability, I can't recommend this enough :)

I seem to be on a glut of roguelike and roguelike inspired games lately. Sword of the Stars: The Pit is an exceedingly competent entry into the genre that is well executed. The graphics are a bit strange but familiar to those that have been with the series, and in the scope of it's own series are done fairly well if not extraordinarialy. (The character animations definetely look to have been done on OpenCanvas or something similar and stand out against the rest of the game, though).

The roguelike elements are definetely the strength of the game. Combat is intuitive, fair, and reasonably balanced. The creature AI can be relied upon to act in a consistent manner which is fairly important for combat in roguelikes, and the different weapons actually add a variety of game mechanics rather than just being incrementally increased versions of the same guns, which is a pitfall of many roguelikes. The random nature of the game can make things in some runs much more difficult, but I never felt the randomness broke a game in the way it can in many roguelikes. If you got a bad roll on a level you can still have an entirely legitimate change of making it through the level if you play skillfully, such as utilising beserk mechanics to cause enemies to fight each other, luring enemies into environmental hazards, through grenades around corners, or placing traps. Which also leads into another of the games strengths - there are a lot of mechanics such as those I just mentioned and they're fairly intuitive for the most part. If you have any experience with roguelikes you likely don't need the tutorial or the manual, although both of those are actually quite well done. The one mechanic I do have a gripe with is the idea of the crafting recipes. It's supposed to be able to find recipes through some of the data panels but I have never done so. Most of them can't be found this way and it turns the game either into experimentation with blind luck, or consulting a wiki. There's some people that like their games like that however, and it's a subjective preference of mine that I don't. The voice acted parts - albeit fairly rare - are actually pretty well done, as well. The whole game just seems to be a game where a significant amount of time and effort has been taken on polishing the game, something sorely lacking from many releases big and small these days.

The biggest criticism I have about the game is that is very "safe". It takes no risks and as such is very generic in the truest sense of the word. However it's a well-executed implementation of the genre with an interesting background story and theme that offers a huge amount of replayability and a variety of different levels of challenge for someone to find their individual level of comfort. Definetely a game to pick up if you enjoy the roguelike genre.

Now that I've broken 100 hours on this game, I feel it is a bit disingenuous to never have written a review of it. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with this game. The first thing to know is that this is probably the only modern roguelike on Steam. Sure, there's ♥♥♥, ADOM, TOME, NetHack, etc. But those are ASCII roguelikes with tile interfaces. This has true ground-up, fully constructed graphics, sound, and music while maintaining the challenge and replayability of the others listed.

Here's the love part of the relationship. This game is infinitely replayable. The different classes handle differently (ahem, other roguelikes that have nominally different classes that basically handle the same). This creates massive variety in playstyle. There is an epically huge amount of items and enemy types. Choices matter. Strategy matters. This is a roguelike with the greatness of a modern UI.

The hate part of the relationship. The recipe system was a hugely original and clever way to put persistence in the game without altering the gameplay or permadeath components. Unfortunately, it is a bit too steep. After 100 hours, I'm not even close to having completed the recipes. This drives me away in frustration every now and again. Once this part is completed, I'll probably enjoy the game more.

The other thing is that it takes a very, very long time to complete a successful run. This means you'll find yourself blaming RNG and the cruelty of the difficulty a bit much. Sometimes this drives me away. To be fair, this is an illusion. Anyone who claims the game is too RNG dependent doesn't know what they are talking about, and you can safely ignore their review. Go watch people who are excellent at the game.

If you play in the Easy - Hard difficulty settings, and you consistently die, then it is your own fault. Post a video of your run, and people will point out the hundreds of tiny mistakes you make each floor that caused you to die in the long run.


Anyway, this game is excellent, and the flaws do not hinder it enough to ever truly pull me away. If you're a roguelike fan and you haven't played this yet, you're missing out big time.

There's no shortage of good. well-developed and deep roguelikes with reasonably modern interfaces these days, so any new contender will have to bring something new and interesting to the table. Sword of the Stars: The Pit succeeds in doing this with a strong survival horror element-not jump scares, but "real" survival horror: resource scarcity, agonizing inventory decisions, and steadily increasing toughness of the enemies tforcing player adaption to the changing situation.

There is classic roguelike RNG going on everywhere, so if you are turned off by random things happening this isn't the game for you. Completing a full successful run of The Pit is a pretty length endeavor as well, so if you are looking for a game that offers you a quick play, this isn't it either. If what you want is a scarcity-driven roguelike with a great interface and a well done setting and theme, The Pit will not disappoint.

I also highly recommend this game to experienced players who feel that today's games are easy to the point of boredom. The Pit is hard, and in a good way-at first it seems that you lose to randomness, but usually it's due to playing sloppy or greedy and this game punishes mistakes in a way that most games don't. You'll find all the challenge you can chew with The Pit, and then some.