Full disclosure -- When I first bought this game, I played for about 10 minutes and decided to submit a steam refund.

Why? the graphics were unsettling, the class I was playing seemed confusing, and in general I felt like the controls wanted me to right click on everything which felt very old school.

Well, a day or two after refunding it, something kept nagging at me to give the game another shot. I was really intrigued by the reviews, and the whole reason I wanted to checkout the game was because I heard how unique the races/classes are. turns out the hotkeys make the game much more playable.

I am now just over 200 hours in, and I have to say I am really enjoying it. I am playing on nightmare / roguelike and I still haven't gotten in a win. I am still making mistakes, but it is a very enjoyable process learning to play this game.

What I particularly like is that it is a more 'longform' roguelike game compared to what I am used to (i.e. binding of isaac or hades) I can really get invested in a character and their build. But it isn't just permadeath slapped onto an rpg, the game is *designed* around permadeath.

there are items and abilities that you can find that will revive you, sometimes even with reprecussions or benefits. There are unlockable races/classes/talents/features that you may find that make you eager to start that next character and try out the new stuff.

Overall, I really like this game and while I was initially put off by it, I am glad I gave it a second chance because I think it is the exact game I was looking for.

While it's definitely not a game for everyone, this is probably **THE** greatest classical roguelike.
The sheer number of different classes ( and skills that still seemingly all work well within the same combat system is amazing.

My favorite part is the sheer amount of different resources that work differently over all the different classes, it makes them actually feel unique, creating insane replayability for fans of the genre. (Especially when you take into account that you can sometimes get skill trees from other classes during your playthrough).

Not sure if the initial learning curve is still as high as it was when I first started playing, but I recommend powering through it, the depth of combat and classes definitely makes up for it a 100%

I find it extremely off-putting when a game, especially a roguelike, earns your trust by providing accurate information and helpful hints similar to "this is very dangerous, are you sure?" only to then lie to your face. Regardless whether it's due to RNG or questionable intentions.

A specific example below.


The quest where you have to go to a cemetery to find a woman that mourns her husband.
The game marks this area for levels 15-25, I think. In the crypt, there are a lot of coffins and whenever you try to interact with them, the game dissuades you by saying that there's a high chance of there being a curse. So it made me think that it's basically a trade-off between a chance of good loot and a chance of a bad curse. I chose not to open any.
Lo and behold, when I get to the woman, she's actually a level 35 boss, and every coffin seems to have produced another level 35-36 boss. Of course I died - I don't think that any amount of skill in this game could've prevent this, unless I already knew what exactly was going to happen here.

Even when I returned there after turning on the adventure mode, I couldn't kill one of the bosses at all because that level 36 bone giant had 50%+ resistance to everything and a high damage negation or something like that (can't recall the details right now). So while any other enemy of his level was receiving 100-200-300 dmg from me (on top of similar numbers that my golem was delivering), this guy was receiving exactly 0 on most turns, with some turns dealing maybe 25 at best. All while he had around 2k HP and a 700 HP heal he could use every 12 turns or something.