Thea: The Awakening (2015)

Intro

Thea 1 is a 4X that combines Civ-like exploration with quests and text adventures. You build up a village with one team while fighting enemies, discovering locations and gathering stuff with one or more expeditions.

The Good

• The lore is unusual, based on Slavic mythology.
• Different gods to play as.
• Multiple options to complete encounters (combat, hunting, talking, etc.).
• You have individual characters instead of generic troops, each with their own skills and equipment.

The Bad

• The interface sucks. Double-clicking doesn't open a town/party screen, you have to hold the right button to move (or press M and click), moving items happens in a tiny screen, hovering over an item doesn't show if someone can carry it (you have to click and hold), etc.
• Tedious and arbitrary gathering. Instead of the Gathering skill determining how much you get it determines how quickly you get a set amount of items. Ugh.
• You get most research points by making items, even if you've already made tons of copies of an item.
• The start seems to be always the same with the same few quests and enemies.
• Incredibly boring tech tree.

The Ugly

• The game is always in Ironman mode - autosave only, only one game at a time.
• Everything is super-random. E.g. a few turns into my second game i got a super-strong, super-tough Dwarf who is also an amazing craftsman.
• Combat sucks. It's a boring card-based system with almost no real choices.
• Auto-resolve sucks. Even feeble enemies can end up killing your troops (and you can't build new ones).
• Other encounter options work exactly like combat just with different cards. And you basically always play the same cards in the same way.

Conclusion

I love text adventures, 4X, card games, unusual lore and player choice. Thea should be the perfect game for me but the excessive RNG and boring combat ruin the game for me. Not to mention that ironman/roguelite is a terrible design choice for a 4X in which games can take dozens of hours.

After coming back to this for a second try on gameplay, I am saddened to say that I had to finally give Thea: The Awakening a pass on my backlog. I haven't really come around to organize the balance between resource gathering, exploring and managing the parties because it can get particularly blurry on the former and the latter. Of course, micro-management is bound to have a long learning curve and though it may start easily with a tutorial in place, making some form of progress is too slow for my liking. The battles in form of card games are all dependent on the party's stats and equipment, though the random turn orders can make or break the ideal outcomes.

The sum of it all is unfortunate, because there is a neat world building and lore based on the Slavic mythology, as well as the micro-management on a scale of a handful of people could have made a fresh gameplay experience. I will leave this as a form of commentary instead of review, as I feel it might appeal to the more dedicated 4X strategy fans and newcomers would know better to read the game description and actual reviews. Still, I'll check out the demo of Thea 2 and see if the changes are for the better.

4x games have always been a weird area for me. I'm too impatient and short-sighted to micromanage well, too squeamish to brutalize my citizens when efficiency demands it, and too peaceful to really want to eradicate all who dare oppose me. All of this leaves me at a significant disadvantage when diving into a genre that, thematically, I adore. Thea: The Awakening does a lot to accommodate these issues, and for that, MuHa Games has my thanks.

T:TA starts off with you selecting one of eight pseudo-Slavic gods to play as, then puts you in control of a small tribe of scared little peasants in the middle of a world shrouded in darkness and overrun with rats and bees and creepy old women who live in chicken foot-houses. As is so often the case in 4x games, your task is simple: explore the world around you, destroy your enemies, research new technology, choose production goals intelligently, and pursue whichever win conditions your little heart desires. The manner in which you do all this, however, is unique in ways that really cater to those of us who couldn't run a Civilization or Master Orion if our lives depended on it. In place of political subterfuge and in-depth micromanagement, MuHa Games instead focused on making an engaging world of supernatural weirdness, heavily flavored with Slavic sadness-myth (which is the best kind of mythology, of course). Instead of units being largely interchangeable, each unit is a unique, named character with personalized stats, equipment, and artwork. You can't build new units either; new recruits arrive through random story events, or when wandering survivors just happen to find your village and decide it's nice enough to join up with. The individual strengths of these characters influence the game's method for resolving conflicts, a weird little card battle minigame that I thought I'd get sick of really fast, but which managed to hold interest and provide me with stressful encounters well into triple-digit hours of gameplay. To top it all off, they even made a DLC and released it to the public free-of-charge. Ain't that just classy.

The game's definitely got some rough edges here and there. Elements of the UI seem a bit sloppy, the behavior of the card game sometimes leaves me scratching my head, and the default volume for the music often engulfs the voice acting. Still, the areas where they did put in polish shine brilliantly. The artwork of all the characters and equipment are excellent, and the aforementioned voice acting is handled by someone perfectly suited to delivering children's fairy tales. Thea: The Awakening may have some flaws, but it's a case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. If you're the sort who religiously purchases Sid Meier's products and never quite manages to play the damn things to completion, this game is for you. And for those of you who do know how to manage sprawling empires effectively, don't worry - the difficulty sliders in T:TA can make the game every bit as stressful as you desire ♥ Unless you are an avowed enemy of the 4x genre, I think this quirky little gem is worth your time and bucks.