So not to take anything away from the effort of the dev, the game is quite an achievement and there are some really cool elements. Finding the lore and piecing together the history was a nice touch. The magic system is pretty cool, though some spells are real mana sinks and you have to be careful at what level you cast as some tier 3 and 4 spells take a TON of mana if you cast at their most effective level. But I gotta say, for me, the game got a bit stale. I tried to push through to the end and got stuck in a couple places and really don't have the desire to figure out how to advance.

It's just the combat. Yeah it's short and precise, kinda cool that there are strengths and weaknesses so you kinda wanna keep extra weapon sets, especially for some of the monsters with hundreds of HP (plenty of non-bosses with couple hundred HP), though usually magic can boost you. But really, that's not the problem... It's just that there is soooo much combat. Sure you can avoid combat with sneak, but then you're gimping your characters skill progression for non-combat abilities like Observation and Disarm since you won't gain levels.

Another mechanic that seems cool but is just frustrating and annoying is the runes tied to the moon cycles. Identifying the runes is "easy" as there are instructions in some locations that let you know which rune goes with which moon or other action/function. But then there is some awesomeness like a run a light up... but there is no apparent function. Is it just for fun? is it a bug? Is it because your torch is out? I just don't care anymore. Additionally, some don't ever light up (talking moon runes, not fey or empty ones). Why? no idea? The other problem is that unless you rest to zenith it's hard to tell when the moon is in zenith. I thought the little sun/moon indicator at the top of the screen was accurate but I'm not so sure. Additionally, the indicator at the side of the screen has something to do with the moons as well (I think), but has nothing to do with zenith or nadir so far as I can tell. It's just a pain and doesn't seem worth the trouble.

The last thing I'll whine about is if you want some really good gear, you often have to make it. Yeah there are some unique items that are cool that you find in secrets (back to gimping your characters if you skip the massive amount of combat). But if you want something that's not just "eh.... OK" like most gear you find, you're going to have to remove enchantments from items you're not wanting to use and add them to others. It's an interesting concept, but adds another element of tedium and, again, not really worth it once you've got multiple casters with holy, fire, and ice enchants from a weapon standpoint. They are useful for armor to get stat increases, though the majority of the time it's only 1 point. Skill increases also, but again, the most useful skills (observe and disarm) I've only ever found in 1 point increases while stuff like stealth I've seen up to 7 points.

Now I don't wanna seem like I'm crapping all over this game. It was fun in the beginning. There are a lot of really cool concepts here too. Just, for me, it got old pretty quick and it's, for an RPG, fairly micromanagey (not a real word) which gets a bit annoying.

Game isn't terrible but I didn't enjoy it too much. I liked certain stuff in-game but enough people talked about the positives, so I am going to only focus on things that personally bothered me.
- UI is quite bad, it does show that it was developed mainly for mobile. For example, ESC key usually returns you to the previous menu/screen, but in certain places it causes a loop between two screens.
- I didn't like the combat. Most enemies past the tutorial area feel like damage sponges and can randomly one-shot you. To make things worse, enemy encounters are regular and scale with player's party/level so if a certain enemy is too hard and you come back later, you can find out that the encounter became even more difficult.
- There are many NPCs but it feels like lots of them are unnecessary and just regurgitate same answers to same questions with minimal differences. The dialogue does get quite repetetive after a while.
- NPC routines can be quite annoying and make finding them difficult. Certain NPCs even appear to be asleep like half the time even during the day which does seem like a bug.

Wasn't for me, although I can see why it is for some, as the combat and exploration is decent enough. But the combination of awkward UI, excessive loot and lacklustre early questing has just made me want to leave it for now. There seems to be a real lack of cohesion to a lot of the game's elements, and I'm not really keen on the "I kinda think this...but who knows....I lost my memory!" dialogue from everyone early game.....people have lost their memory.....I get it....there's no need for everyone I speak to for 6 hours to keep ramming that point home, it gets boring. Not a bad game, just one which I found lacking.

I wanted to like this more. I think the price point is really good for what you're getting from a strictly value standpoint. My biggest issue is combat, you are constantly fighting. The issue with it is fighting starts to get rapidly less rewarding outside of mastering skills as the power increases are minimal and strictly your skills. I was trying to avoid fights, move around them, and just not do them after a while. You still get sucked into them and they're still fairly dull. You do hop into a grid and get do some extra movement type stuff but it's ultimately not that relevant.

Considering we're fighting all the time it needed to be more fun.

I like the art style, I like the theme, I even initially liked the combat enough but it's already dragging for me at 4 hours, I know it'll be even worse later.

The ending is a blatant cliffhanger and a "thank you" letter from developers.

The combat is a boring chore and used as filler. It drags itself out with needless animations, screen transitions and (sometimes empy) debriefing screens. You will be constantly interrupted. Fights have no weight to them, you just get spammed by mob all the time.

The monster lore system is pointless. Half of the monsters share the same resistances and weaknesses.

Stealth, dodge, status spells and many other skills are pointless. Brute forcing is the dominant strategy. You will just spam the same two spells that damage every enemy at once.

I was incredibly enthusiastic to play this game, but now I feel offended. It's one of these games that the developer wouldn't enjoy themselves but but expect the customers to.

It fails due to its elementary design flaws that are just unacceptable. Dealing with nightmarish UI design and being constantly interrupted by spurious inescapable combat completely ruins whatever this game had to offer.

The UI is an overwhelming mess of colors. There is no button that returns you to the game screen. Continuously pressing Esc can get you stuck in a loop of menus,

Level design is confusing, you can't tell what is what and you sometimes will find yourself unable to find the entrance that you initially entered through. You navigate with mouse, so due to many unclear obstacles your character will often just navigate straight into enemy encounters.

Enemies swarm the maps, constantly forcing you into small inconsequential skirmishes that only serve to waste your time. Running away from enemies requires twitch reflexes - many are faster than you, unrelenting and they never stop. Running away during combat does not interrupt the chase - as soon as you go back to normal screen, they immidiately resume the chase at full speed. You will find yourself in a loop of 20 combats from which you need to escape every time you don't want to fight, relying on twitch reflexes to navigate out of confusing environments that you are allowed to look at for 1 second before being forced into another combat screen.

Hmmm.

Sadly I am marking this as a not recommend, and I lurve most CRPGs. It has its charms - nice pixel graphics, humorous writing, exploration, amusing details like the dog carrying a torch if it is a 'leader' or dog specific NPC chats... But it is plagued by a zillion trivial combats, each taking a minute or two to win. They are no threat, not interesting and kinda dull ... and that boring time adds up! I feel it wastes my time. Yet skipping them by running or sneaking is itself a minor chore and feels like it punishes your xp progression.

Also the game systems are poorly explained and inconsistent (apparently in lockpicking it doesn't use team skill OR leader skill, but instead you have to select the character you want to use after starting the task from the right side of the screen! Nowhere else does this pattern occur that I saw! I just thought it was impossible to pick locks for a while, or had a bug where it forced me to use the wrong characters). Also while there is apparently a respec it occurs in Act 3 which is a fair way in, so you may be better off restarting if you stuff up your first build and realise early enough.

In the end most of my complaints are QOL things and shouldn't be a killer, but enough poor QOL makes it not fun to play.... Which is where I landed in the end. Maybe I will retry it again later but at this point I have other games to try on my backlog.

I wanted to like this game, but I found myself frustrated a lot of the time and I have to give up for now.

I was looking forward to using my controller for this, but that quickly went out the window, the game will detect all of your inputs but the UI is not setup to be navigable with the controller easily. Many instances I ended up not being able to click on or exit something without using my mouse. The UI overall leaves much to be desired, I could make another post on that but while it is not streamlined or intuitive I was able to figure out most of it with a lot of clicking around.

The moons mechanic is interesting, and I find it intriguing for the story. For the few moon signs/relics I interacted with I found myself more frustrated than satisfied.

In the hideout in the caves there is what appears to be a magic door, with the 3 moon symbols around it. Fortunately for me one was lit at the time, and I had read the books and things, so I immediately figured out it was reacting to a moon zenith. A few rests in the room nearby, because you cannot rest near these symbols (which happens again) and I figure out which symbol is for which moon. So I kept resting and checking over and over but never managed to get more than 2 of them lit. Since I had spent almost 30minutes at this point, in addition to searching the rest of the area, I decided to move on and come back later. Perhaps it would be easier with more information or items.
This theme carried on for the others I found, some I could rest next to and keep an eye on them, but others I could not so I was forced to wait and check again. It's not a game killer, but it was not "fun" to rest arbitrarily.

Within the first 2 hours I also soft locked myself. In the hideout in the caves there is a standing torch in a room, and standing on it locked me in place. I was unable to move anymore even after reloading. Auto-save seems to only trigger when you enter an area, and I had been there a while since I felt relatively safe. I lost over an hour of progress by rolling back to the Auto-save. Ok, no problem, I'll just save more often.

This one was my fault, but I also hit quit before save when exiting the game. But there was no prompt or anything that tried to warn me so I lost about 20 minutes of reading and exploring which was easy to make up. Again, more frequent Auto-saves would have helped this.

Then, after some hard fought combat, I collected some sweet sweet loot. Identified the magic item and was excited to equip it. Exited combat and stuck in the corner of a wall. This is where I quit. I only have 8 hours and I've spent 2 hours re-doing content, most of which was not my fault.

Combat was another issue for me. The combat interface is clunky and inconsistent. Trying to melee will move you in range, but casting a spell you have to move manually. Some spells have descriptions that don't seem to match their actual function at all, like magic missile which definitely does not shoot 3 projectiles and only does 2 damage compared to the 2 digit numbers of other spells you can find nearly immediately. There are environmental obstacles which impede line of sight, but you can walk all over them so there is never any positioning required other than trying to keep your weaker party members in the back. Maybe I didn't play long enough, but the enemies seem either very weak or very strong. Almost nothing felt like a challenge that was won with good play and not luck. I ended up heavily relying on stuns to take care of larger monsters and multiple monsters since it lasts multiple turns , all the while chipping down large monsters health over multiple turns and one hitting small ones like they didn't exist.

The art is cool, the story is fun, and the world feels alive and engaging. I think this can be a great game with a bit more polish. I'm looking forward to re-visiting this game in the future but I cannot recommend this today.

Horrible unintuitive UI and design. In general I like indie games and pixel art but could not force myself through this.

A charming game made with love, but needs more of it. The good part of the game is that it has a charming story, it trusts the players to find it, it has interesting magic and skills out of combat.... BUT the game has VERY bad combat. It is incredibly boring and since there are long cooldowns, it does not really feel strategic, enemies are spongy and you need to use every skill multiple times to kill enemies, which with cooldowns completely limits any strategy. Instead of making great plays against the odds, you just smack what ever currently comes off cooldown... The main issue with that is that the game forces you into one battle after another. And since enemis are spongy and combat takes a long time, you just constantly fight and fight and fight...

Combat grinder, not my thing.