Steam Curator

In the solar system of roguelite indie deckbuilders, there’s no question of who the sun is. Slay the Spire’s rays are so blinding and its gravitational pull so strong that it’s almost impossible to talk about any of the games in its orbit without first prostrating in the warmth of its glow and acknowledging some obvious comparisons.

Astrea: Six Sided Oracles is a celestially themed celestial body in that galaxy: you’ve got deliberate turn-based combat where enemies stand on the right side of the screen and telegraph their intent. You’ve got a deck of dice instead of cards, but they operate under a lot of the same global deckbuilding principles: start with some weak and simple base dice then expand and replace them over the course of a forty minute to hour long ascent up a tower. Much like its peers, the name of the game is thoughtful deck construction and probability manipulation; where stacking the deck (or, I guess, weighing the dice) helps bolster your odds of successfully completing a run.

It’s addictive and fun if you’re into this kind of thing, and importantly there are a few unique twists that make it more than just an astral reskin of a game you’ve already played before. In fact, Astrea benefits a lot from you bringing some deckbuilding knowledge with you. It almost expects you to be one of those little freaks with multiple real life days played in Slay the Spire due to a base level rules complexity and choice quantity that put it among the harder games in this genre.

Even the one-star-difficulty beginner character they give you in the tutorial still demands a lot of strategy from you. If that’s a proposition that excites you instead of scaring you, then Astrea will reward you with a soft moonlit glow of its own: a deep and worthwhile deckbuilder with endless variety, tight balance, a consistently beautiful presentation, and more than enough differentiation from its evergreen peers to ensure it has a pull of its own.

Everything in Astrea is red, blue, or the purple in between. Most of the enemies look like a thematic inversion of your characters. Everything and everyone can be impacted by the red corruption, and ‘dying’ in a run will have you turn into a freaky eldritch beast while you look at the game over screen.

It’s not just a striking presentation motif that unifies the entire game into an elegant-celestial-with-horror-undertones aesthetic, but also a visual reinforcement of one of the games core mechanics–healing and damage aren’t discrete actions but two sides of the same coin.

Purification and Corruption are the two big keywords here. From a combat perspective, purification will damage enemies and heal you, and corruption does the inverse. It’s an important acknowledgement because part of the games whole shtick is compulsory plays: get a bad roll on your dice and it lands on the ‘do big corruption’ face, and you will be forced to play it–it’s just a matter of whether or not you’d rather that big corruption damage you or heal your opponent.

If you’ve got bad luck, fear not. The game gives you a lot of outs even if you find yourself continuously rolling snake eyes. Discarding and rerolling take on new meaning in a game with risky cards like this, but importantly there are also ways you can directly manifest that corruption to help you.

Astrea takes the concept of using your health as a resource and pushes it to the utmost extreme. There are character-specific powers that exist at different health thresholds that give you powerful boons. Reduce yourself to one HP on the engineer character, for example, to allow either of your turrets to use a second dice for the turn.

Importantly, you can activate these more than once per turn if you reduce down to that threshold multiple times. Take that same engineer at one HP: heal him then damage him again and you’ll have his turret refresh accessible to you once more.

Most of the time this is the ideal way to play, reinforced by the whole visual design of the game: great power comes at risk of being corrupted by it. The strongest abilities on your healthbar are typically towards the lower end of it, so you’re incentivized to play scrappy and teeter back and forth at risky health thresholds instead of comfortably keeping yourself topped off at max health.

Engaging with self damage doesn’t feel bad long term either: Astrea intelligently splits your health up into a more short-term combat health and a long-term run health. Going down to one HP in a battle won’t punish you for the next battle as long as you don’t hit zero and lose one of your actual two to three heart pieces.

It’s an excellent system, one that has you looking at health and damage in new ways and effectively doubling the options for every dice in the game due to their bidirectional capabilities. By itself this system could have buoyed an entire deckbuilder but in Astrea it’s but one of its pillars.

The dice are the other and they, too, add a lot of texture to the decision-making. In addition to how they force you to engage with bad rolls, they add an entire new axion of how they can be evaluated. Sure, the dice exist on a spectrum from good to bad and from broad to narrow, but also on a more Astrea-specific spectrum of ‘riskless to dangerous’. Most dice come in three variants of safe, balanced, and risky: and your most successful runs will be defined by how well you understand your current build’s risk tolerance, and if you can try to use any of that risk in your favor. My first successful beating of the super-duper final boss was thanks to some early-run powerups that gave me both shielding and extra purification when I corrupted enemies, allowing me to make a pivot into lots of risky dice whose bad faces were now slightly less bad.

There are only a few areas where Astrea is corrupt and in need of some purification. Despite its beautiful and cohesive stellular theme, strict adherence to that theme does occasionally leave the gameplay feeling tooltip heavy. Simple and universal gameplay concepts like poison, block, strength, and dozens more get dressed in cosmic appropriate relabels like Relief, Light Shield, and Serenity. Even after a week’s worth of runs I find myself leaning on mouseover pretty heavily to remind myself ‘what exactly was the difference between Torment and Affliction again’? You really feel it thanks to the very buff and debuff heavy nature of many of the builds, and that also exacerbates Astrea’s dire need for an end of turn preview button. Between you, your opponent, and each of your sentinels, there’s frequently six participants in any given battle with their own attacks, buffs, and debuffs that spiral into Rube Goldberg machines of chain reactions that can take a lot of time to parse manually: a little predicted outcome option would save a lot of time in ensuring whether or not hitting the end turn button will resolve with your death.

And though it wasn’t the primary method I played with, the few times I ventured to my couch and relied on the games controller support I found it at odds with how many interactables were on screen at any given time: just keep that in mind if you planned on playing that way.

Between its health system that allows for creative gameplay, its ‘weigh-the-dice’ approach to odds manipulation, and its elegant theme that ties those concepts into visual and gameplay metaphors for finding balance, Astrea: Six Sided Oracles is a masterful and must-play deckbuilder.

There are few deckbuilding experiences as deep and endless as the ones provided by these Six Oracles. Though there are many titles that have replicated Slay the Spire’s mechanics, fewer have done so as elegantly and as transformatively as here.

Thanks to its endless variety and profound mechanics, Astrea is almost certain to spawn a few orbiters of its own.