Thea: The Awakening

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 to the adventuring component, and the challenges are fun. Don’t expect much hand-holding, but expect the challenge to be enjoyable and tense.

When I started playing Thea: The Awakening, I was excited for its possibilities. I'd love to play the game that I thought, in those early hours, that I was playing. If the card battle system were better and less predictable, if there was more stuff to do with your village and a greater tension between exploration and protecting your home, if failure weren't quite so punishing or random at times… Thea breaks the mold by doing a lot of different things at once. It just needs to do all of them better.

Thea: The Awakening is something of a surprise, really. From an unknown indie developer comes a game that blends RPG and strategy together very well, in a fashion that means one doesn’t dilute the strengths of the other. It is complex, sure, and perhaps that will be off-putting for as many as it will be endearing for, but there’s an original game here - one that ought to appeal to fans of both spectrum of genres.

Slavic atmosphere and unusual mechanics that are difficult to assign to one genre – these are the most important aspects of Thea: The Awakening. The question is: are these interesting solutions complemented by good gameplay?

Thea: The Awakening is a strong Early Access title, and needs a few minor tweaks to make it really good.

Thea: The Awakening will have you slay monsters, forage for food, craft gear, and adventure through countless quests and events while surviving long enough to reshape the randomly-generated world the way you see fit.

Thea combines 4X, Card Games, crafting, and more to make an interesting beast that ultimately struggles to carry its own weight despite novelty.

Thea: The Awakening has lots of interesting ideas, but shoves them into a compilation and order that stop them from being enjoyable. It isn't bad, so much as it is sure to cause a state of befuddlement in all who play it. It's also very hard to recommend this over, say, Civilisation VI. Add in the slight technical bumps and you have an awkward Switch port of a weird game. It just feels like someone through darts at a list of genres and went for it. 10/10 for ambition, not so much for the end result.