Thea the Awakening is currently 50% off on Steam to celebrate the games imminent release on consoles. The Kickstarter for Thea 2 has been announced for September.

It's been a long road, but we've finally arrived. The full, single-player, version of Thea: The Awakening is coming to consoles.

You can pre-order on XBox One from May 17th as well.

Now, this is a Steam forum, yes, but if you have friends who only play consoles (yeah, I know...) or you fancy having a copy of Thea to play in the living room, spread the word!

Cheers!

P.S. In other news, development of Thea 2 is going well. We have set a date for Thea 2's Kickstarter to September 2017, and we've booked a space for the EGX Birmingham, also in September, so keep your eye out for more news coming soon.

In Part 1 of their Thea: The Awakening diary, RPS focuses research on bones and examines the nature of children as commodities.

I have 5 bones, 77 meats and 6 children. Those are my villages resources. There’s a lot of other things, of course, but those are the most important. The children will one day grow into fully-fledged villagers but for now, they are marked as a resource, possibly stored in the same warehouse as the coal and vegetables. But it is their potential that keeps the rest of us going – the thought of a brighter future that makes life worth living in the town of Bilge Finger. I wonder what happens when you drag the children to this box?

“You are about to destroy 3 x Child. Are you sure?”

Thea: The Awakening is a lot better than I expected. It’s a not-quite-4X strategy survival game. The story begins by juggling all the fantasy tropes you can think of. There’s an omniscient evil imaginatively titled ‘the darkness’ and recognisable badness in the form of skeletons, goblins, demons, spiders and witches. But there’s also some Slavic twists on the genre – the Dziody are a crowd of old geezers who love to eat, and if you visit them bearing food they’ll cure any curses you’ve got lingering about your person.

Read more.

MuHa Games has added co-op multiplayer to Thea: The Awakening according to the latest update on Steam. The co-op is added in the form of a free dlc which you can see here.

The second DLC for Thea is here! You were all waiting for it so let's just skip to the meat:

New features and improvements:
- Co-op mode (as a separate download - see DLC section),
- A set of new events, fully translated and voiced,
- A set of additional events in English (as a separate download - see DLC section),
- Recipe screen now tells what are the chances of obtaining a good quality item,
- Turn Summary will show the amount of resources received and indicate if they come from gathering or from a building,
- Gathering tasks show the amount of resource currently in the group's inventory,
- Added Community Language - French,
- Entity Info screen and event drop list now displays information if a weapon is 1- or 2-Handed,
- New icons on Research/Crafting recipes screen,
- New icons for dozens of items (and 1-handed weapon icons can be more easily told apart from 2-handed weapons),
- Entity info screen now shows materials and properties on one page (no tab),
- New Building - Blessed Paths - increases gathering range of the player's Village,
- New icons for difficulties 6 to 10,
- Re-balanced armours and shields,
- Re-balanced unliving rats.

Fixes:
- Mokosh lvl 5 now properly gives +4 Health instead of +1 to your villagers,
- Setting craft count to maximum possible should work correctly now,
- Fixed a bug in the Scholar Village, where you should learn Herbalism but didn't. Also changed the prerequisites for Medic training, so that only existing medics will be able to improve their skill, not a random person,
- Fixed a bug in the Cosmic Tree quest where you had a dialogue option with the Leshy that should not have been visible till later,
- Fixed Weatherer using incorrect graphics,
- Preset group loading fix,
- Fixed a bug where a gatherer would get unassigned from a task if there is more than one resource of this type available for gathering,
- Fixed a hang in the Events Editor that happened when two lists contained no elements in common,
- In bloodbath mode, a character having 0 life no longer shows as critically injured as it effectively has 0% chance to die,
- Fixed damage received when fleeing from a fight in Bloodbath mode,
- Fixed "--" that was displayed during event resolving, when a wound tag was removed,
- Fixed calculation of the time it should take for a tasks to complete (if fuel supplies changed).

We hope you'll enjoy the new features and that there are no game-breaking bugs :P

The Return of the Giants DLC for Thea: The Awakening is out now:

The Giants return to Thea and wreck havoc, threatening to destroy everything you built so far!

The Return of the Giants is the first free DLC for Thea: The Awakening.

Key Features:

• 70 new events, including a new main, Giant quest line.
• Events editor that allows you to create your own quests!
• Additional card artworks and event art.
• New building types.
• New creatures and plenty of Giants!
• Full, English voice over for all events.
• Game localized to four languages (DE, FR, PL, RU).
• New music tracks.
• Many community requested features.

Plus extra fixes and improvements throughout the game.

The Giants DLC will be released in April - eXplorminate has interviewed Khash (lead programmer) and Yuuki (lead designer) about all new features:

Thea: The Awakening Giants Q&A

s we move from winter into spring, companies are starting to roll out their new games and DLCs. Muha Games, producer of our 2015 game of the year Thea: The Awakening, is no exception. Soon they will be launching Giants, their first DLC for Thea. We contacted Khash (lead programmer) and Yuuki (lead designer) who were gracious enough to take some time out from their busy development schedule to answer a few questions about the new content as well as share some new artwork!

Question: Before we talk about your upcoming DLC, can you tell us how the last four months have gone for Muha Games?

Khash: It was amazing. We never thought the players community would be so great. Most of our previous experience was from bigger companies where players are disconnected from developers by a shield of community managers. We had a chance to experience first hand how helpful and joyful it can be to interact with players. We do have to  limit our interactions [with the fans] to a certain degree so that we can provide as much new content as possible, but the love we received is the best reward we could imagine. THANK YOU SO MUCH EVERYONE!!!

Yuuki: Yes, just that, THANKS! It has been amazing. I mean, I think Khash basically hasn’t slept in a year, or something, and we’re all hard at work doing fixes and the DLC, but the reception we got made it worthwhile. Some friends sometimes say: “didn’t you finish your game already, why are you still working on it?” and yeah, we just laugh. So it’s all hands on deck, still trying to take in all the feedback from the forums and just making Thea better as much as we can.

[...]

Indie Game Reviewer checked out the RPG/Roguelike/4X Hybrid Thea: The Awakening:

Thea: The Awakening – What We Think:

Thea: The Awakening from indie developer MuHa Games sets out to meld the concepts behind RPGs, Roguelikes and 4X gameplay into an entirely new kind of game whilst remaining comfortably familiar to anyone who has sat behind the controls of a turn-based strategy. It’s always exciting when developers step outside the usual conventions of established genres and give us something new to explore. Treading new ground can be risky, but it’s fair to say Thea does so with grace.

[...]

Wide Awake

Thea: The Awakening is an excellent experiment in combining genres that pays off in its unique, if often meandering, gameplay. Fans of roguelikes, RPGs and 4X games are likely to find something to enjoy here, and even if one of these genres is not normally your cup of tea you’ll likely find enough of the others to keep you entertained. Thea manages to be both familiar and innovative at the same time whilst providing a dynamic, nonlinear and engrossing adventure.

Score: 4/5

The Linux version of Thea: The Awakening, is made available free of charge (and without any support as well).

So, Khash mentioned in another thread that we are unable to support, or even test Thea on Linux, and sadly, nothing has changed here. But, we decided to make the Linux version, as it is, available to anyone who wants to play with it.

Now I will just say once more that we will not be supporting this version and we do not know how well it works as it is, but hey, if you want to check it out, its here and it's free.

If you decide to have a go at it, please do leave us some feedback. Who knows, maybe one day we'll be able to play with it ourselves and fix it up, but no promises!

Enjoy!

Thanks Eye

Here are a bunch of reviews for Thea: The Awakening.

COG, 8:

Slavic mythology, card minigames, and hexagonal turn-based strategic gameplay are just the beginnings to what Thea: The Awakening has to offer. With such a high replay value, it’ll keep you entertained and busy for much more than you would expect. It definitely packs a big punch for an ‘under the radar’ game, and should definitely be on the wishlists of those who fancy strategy, resource management-based games.

Indie Game Magazine:

Thea: The Awakening offers a good time for a tactical player, but is also remarkably frustrating due to the challenges it offers as a survival game. Thankfully, death does not come without its rewards, as the god that had been looking over the village will receive experience based on the success of the villagers. Success is measured, in part, in how far they went while exploring and taking part in certain story events. The card system remains the most frustrating element, though is also the most innovative feature of the game. Though this system and setting up a strategy are difficult to comprehend, they are worth the effort in order to learn to utilize more than just the mediocre stats of starting villagers. It is possible to often auto-resolve encounters without using cards, but the results will always have more failures, injuries, and deaths if they are not used.

Next Powerup:

Thea contains everything you could possibly dream of in a 4X title, and every single aspect is so deep you can very easily lose an entire day min-maxing a single expedition for a singular purpose. The time required to really excel in this game may put a fair amount of more casual 4X players off. For most others, disappointed by the latest Civilization titles, Thea: The Awakening is one of the best bastions of 4X I have ever played. Aspects may not appeal to certain players, but they can easily be skipped over with the customisation of the game setup, or in my case, with the auto-resolve for combat. It worries me that Thea won't be recognised for its gloriously crafted core systems simply because it's a new title by a smaller studio. There are some small, less than entertaining aspects for me personally, but in my humble impressions this is one of the greatest 4X titles I think the gaming world will ever see.

How Do I Jump:

There’s a wall to climb over at the beginning. But if you’re willing to take the time to learn the system, it is a challenging, unique, and refreshing alternate to the classic 4x Turn-based civilization/god game. The writing is frustrating, but it’s forgivable because Thea’s setting lends to an epic dark fantasy world like Game of Thrones or The Witcher. This makes me *want* to send my Expeditions out to the farthest reaches to uncover hidden lore and undoubtedly be torn asunder by skeletons. John Snow and Geralt aren’t here to save you, but that means you get to be the stoic badass driving back the darkness. Wake up and play.

And there are these:

Mouse n Joypad, 8.9

One Guy, too many Games

Press A 2 Join, 8.1

Explorminate, Recommended

My Gamer Mind

Thanks Eye.

Spacesector has reviewed the surprise hit Thea: The Awakening:

Winter is a time often filled with surprises and wonderful gifts. I am pleased to report that I’ve received a fantastic surprise of my own. Thea: The Awakening, from developer MuHa Games, is my biggest surprise in strategy gaming this year. Often, I find out about games years before their release, but this one flew below my radar for a long time. It is perhaps not only my discovery of the game that is a surprise, but also the fact that the game released at all. It survived not one, but two failed Kickstarter campaigns. If there’s one thing this game’s story teaches though, it’s that it is never too late to turn things around. This is true not just in the game itself, but in indie development as well.

Shortly before release, I provided my first impressions of the game. Not that much has changed since that time, but I’ll be providing more in-depth coverage and analysis here based on my additional time with the final release.

[...]

Thea: The Awakening is an indie game that proves there is more than one way to build a strategy game. Its change in focus and design won’t make it a hit with all strategy fans, but for these very same reasons it offers a great experience for fans looking for something new or who also enjoy storytelling and RPGs. With tons of events to uncover, numerous gods to play, multiple endings, and lots of ways to approach running your village, there is certainly plenty of content to keep one busy for many hours.

Score: 8/10

The Good:

• Unique and immersive setting
• Event system creates a strong and interesting narrative
• Challenge system allows for combat that involves more than just brawn
• Loads of resources to gather and items to craft
• Multiple victory conditions and endings to uncover
• Rewards repeated play

The Bad:

• Less strategic elements and more RPG elements than some may prefer
• Luck can be very kind or very cruel
• Events, especially early ones, repeat a bit too often
• Rewards and encounters can feel uneven at times

Thea: The Awakening has been released today on Steam:

Thea: The Awakening is a strategic survival game steeped in Slavic myth and monstrosity after an apocalyptic force called The Darkness stroke. The game combines turn-based gameplay, with the tension and grit of a rogue-like survival, captivating story you can uncover through a series of in-game events and a unique combat based on a complex card battle game.
 
Released in Early Access back in September 2015, Thea already gathered a group of devoted players and very positive reviews. Last two months were full of work for the developers. They managed to fix major bugs and improve the gameplay based on the feedback from the community, so the game can now be released in its full glory.

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Thea: The Awakening will be released on November 20:

Thea: The Awakening Releasing Soon

Finally, we can tell you that Thea: The Awakening will be leaving Steam Early Access on November 20th. If you don’t know what Thea is by now, here’s is a Q&A and a preview to help familiarize yourself but here is a summary directly from MuHa Games, the developer: 

Thea: The Awakening is a turn-based strategic survival game steeped in Slavic myth and monstrosity set after an apocalyptic force known only as The Darkness has engulfed the world. There are Strigas and Baba Yaga’s aplenty, but there are no heroes, no monster slayers, and no great armies capable to banish them. Just a few hopeless and starving survivors, who are desperately trying to stay alive. You are their only and last true hope!

The game combines turn-based strategic gameplay, with the tension and grit of a rogue-like survival, captivating story you can uncover through a series of in-game events and a unique combat, based on a complex card battle game.

The wide range of gameplay features allows you to proceed through the world of Thea the way you prefer it. You can chose to stay in your village and build up defenses or go out exploring the world. You can also try to resolve conflict through assassination, stealth or diplomacy, so that a fight isn’t the only way out.

Choose your game style and save your people from the Darkness!

Key Features:

• Survival game in a dark fantasy setting with hexagonal, turn-based strategic gameplay!

• Huge procedural world to explore – each playthrough is a new adventure!

• Village management with a variety of structures to build, upgrades and technologies to discover and items to craft!

• Over 4400 items that you can craft in your village or gather in the game’s world!

• Expeditions in which each member carries his gear and gains experience in battle, collecting resources, diplomacy, healing, black magic and dozens of other abilities!

• Over 200 non-linear story events that can grant you riches or deprive you of all your goods and even life!

• Exciting card battle game system which resolves combat, diplomacy, curses and more!

• Over 100 types of deadly creatures, many inspired by Slavic Mythology!

• Procedural creature instances – each creature, even in a swarm of spiders, has its own skills and stats!

• Day & night cycle influencing the gameplay – villagers can better recognise threats from afar during the day and creatures become more aggressive during the night!

• Multiple game endings depending on your choices with rewards and unlocks carrying to the next playthrough!

[...]

Thanks Farflame!

TinyPixxels has interviewed Muha Games about the turn based strategic survival game
Thea: The Awakening. The game has interesting elements of slavic mythology build in.

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I got to talk to this amazing lady that's working on Thea: The Awakening!
Check it out here.

-> Steam

Eye spotted two previews for the Early Access game Thea: the Awakening:

Gamepressure:

Thea: The Awakening impressions – an unusual mix of genres in a Slavic setting

Slavic mythology is rarely used theme. With the exception of The Witcher, we’d be hard-pressed to name a recently-made, successful game that was inspired by the old beliefs of this ethnic group. This is where Thea: The Awakening comes in.

The game offers quite an intriguing premise: it's a turn-based fantasy strategy that combines mechanisms typical for survival productions with solutions known from card games. The gameplay is fairly open-ended, with most elements random in nature (it’s quite obvious that the roguelike genre has been a huge inspiration). To make matters even more interesting, the story is deeply rooted in Slavic mythology with a sprinkling of post-apocalyptic themes. This specific combination is enough to make the title intriguing – and raise some doubts as well. There's no denying that mixtures like this often turn out so overdone that they become virtually unplayable.

The failed Kickstarter campaign didn't look too optimistic either; even though the developers aimed at collectijg a modest amount of GBP 10,000, they didn't even manage to acquire half of this sum. Refusing to give up, they got down to hard work instead, and the fruit of their labor comes in the form of an early access version on Steam Greenlight.

[...]

eXplorminate:

Thea: The Awakening Preview

Back in September, eXplorminate did a preview article outlining all the upcoming 4X and strategy games for our next “fiscal” year. One that we mentioned as “quickly becoming one of our most anticipated indie titles” was Thea: The Awakening. Well, the developers at Muha Games have not disappointed.

Thea is something of a hybrid game. It’s best described as a mash-up of 4X, Roguelike, and Survival genres. That may sound like quite a claim, but in this case, it’s true. The developers at Muha Games have taken some of the quintessential elements from each genre and combined them into a surprisingly good mix. Thea has the eXploration, eXploitation, and eXtermination mechanics from 4X genres, it has the perma-death and ironman no-save elements from Roguelikes, and it is immersed in the ambiance and resource management mechanics that define the survival genre. I consider it a “4X-Lite” with Roguelike and Survival heritage.

Thea is currently in Early Access on Steam. I’ve gotten about 16 hours into the game at this point, and I’m still hardly scratching the surface. The unique Slavic folklore in which Thea is immersed in, is very well done. It is refreshing to play a fantasy game that’s not textbook Tolkien (even though I do enjoy Tolkienesque games greatly). Thea’s dark mood and unfamiliar mythos bring something unique to the table that I think many players will appreciate.

In Thea you portray a deity who has come back from oblivion to try to rebuild the world. Each time you play a game in Thea you earn XP, win or lose. This XP accumulates and your avatars level up and gain new abilities that improve your villagers. The first few times you try Thea, you’re going to lose. I promise. However, you’ll gain that XP and each subsequent play will get a little easier. Once you get the hang of it, Thea becomes an extraordinarily pleasurable game. It never really gets “easy” in my estimation. Play is always challenging and fun. Muha has done a great job balancing the game already and is making further progress each week.

[...]

If you’ve been hunting for a dark fantasy game, with lots of unique and interesting mechanics, Thea might be what you’re looking for. I would advise that you watch a few Let’s Play videos and check out their forums before making any purchase. You also might want to peruse Nate’s Q&A with the developers. They explained a lot of what went into making Thea. As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, it is a mash-up of several genres and this conglomeration won’t appeal to everyone.

This is just a preview, so I can’t make any kind of recommendation. I will tell you this, though. I am very much enjoying myself. Frustrating as it is at times, I do feel like I’m always making progress, and even when I lose, I am having so much fun, I jump right back in and start a new game. If you do decide to take the plunge and get Thea now (on sale for $19.99 on Steam), I wish you good hunting and good luck. You’re gonna need it!

Highland Arrow previewed Thea: The Awakening a turn-based, rogue-like, strategic-survival game, set in a post-apocalyptic dark fantasy world:

Thea - The Awakening is a narrative-focussed 4X strategy game developed and published by MuHa Games.  I had a few people asking me after this one given my review of King of Dragon Pass given the thematic similarities and I have to say, it's an interesting one, though somewhat it's own beast.  It's somewhat like KODP meets the Civilisation games, or perhaps more aptly, like a Heroes of Might and Magic game where the quests actually involve narratives rather than you just shaking things down for an item or three.  I rather enjoyed it, though it has it's flaws, so let's break it down, shall we?

From the Darkness

The "Awakening" part of the title relates to the setting of Thea and its context - a world plunged into a mythical apocalypse and overrun by the forces of darkness, finally starting to recover and lick its wounds.  The game begins with you selecting one of a handful of the good or neutral-aligned deities to guide your people with (though you begin with two available and unlock more with play) and then a starting village and expedition.

The village is your city basically, and shares most of it's mechanics with Civilisation.  You can build upgrade buildings and gather resources here, all pretty much in the same vein as Civ here, although each of your villagers has individual stats, and some will be better at gathering resources than others, so allocations become a more involved decision.  The newer item on the city screen is crafting, where you can also assign villagers to create items for your people, be it craft tools that increase their abilities, or weapons and army to outfit your expedition party.  Statistics of the villagers are the big new add here, and the items allows you some control over the randomly-generated nature of these.

Second mechanic to the mix is that of expedition parties, which are essentially your "armies" of a sort, but they are more akin to an adventuring party than an army.  Consisting of a handful or two of your villagers, these explorers can go out, fight roaming enemies, go to special locations to interact with neutral locals, and quest in ancient ruins and the like.  Each is outfitted with arms and armour you craft in the village or find on your travels, and must carry with them fuel (wood and the like) and food to support themselves, creating something of a logistics need as well, though you can also have an expedition forage for food in the field.

[...]

A compelling Adventure

Despite all those problems, this is quite the fun little game, so I feel it would be wrong of me to end on a negative note.  Really the same thing that can ruin runs is also what makes it compelling - that random nature.  No two plays are the same, and there's quite an interesting world to explore, and most importantly, an interesting world I want to explore.  So many games give you that open world, or big story foci, but don't really involve you, or a lot of it feels extraneous, but Thea focusses on it's main theme quite effectively, and by telling it in such a way that you're following your villagers on their respective journeys from the adulthood ceremonies all the way to whatever end awaits, there becomes a brilliant amount of investment in those characters.

-> Steam - Early Access

Nayla Games made a first impressions video about Thea: The Awakening:

We take a quick look Thea: The Awakening a 4X rogue-like strategy game!
Really enjoyed the role play and story telling in this :)

Find this game on Steam Early Access.

Thea: The Awakening is coming to Steam Early Access on September 28:

Thea: The Awakening is a strategic survival game inspired by Slavic mythology and folklore and set in a dark, post-apocalyptic fantasy world.

Summary of Features:

• A survival game in a Fantasy setting with hexagonal, turn-based strategic gameplay!
• Rich world inspired by Slavic Mythology with over 90 creatures roaming Thea!
• Over 200 non-linear dynamic events that can grant you riches or claim all you have!
• Exciting card mini game used to resolve not only combat, but even diplomacy/disease/curses and more!
• A procedural world with large world maps to explore, and 50 different world resources!
• Over 4000 items, all with an ability to either gather/harvest them in the world or craft from what you have collected!
• Multiple endings depending on game choices
• Rewards and unlocks that carry on to the next playthrough, encouraging replayability
• Opportunity to become one of 8 Slavic Gods/Goddess, each with unique bonuses, and decide the fate of Thea!
• Procedural creature instances – each creature, even in a swarm of spiders, has its own skills and stats!
• Day/night system influencing gameplay

Thea is a world steeped in Slavic Myth and Monstrosity. There are Strigas and Baba Yaga's aplenty, but, there are no heroes, no monster slayers, and no great armies ready to banish them for you. Just a few hopeless and starving survivors, who are desperately trying to stay alive. And you: their only true hope.

Thea: The Awakening combines traditional, turn-based, strategic gameplay, with the tension and grit of a survival game, together with a story driven events system and a unique card minigame! Having all these features, it is Your gaming style that will guide how You play Thea! You can chose to stay in your village and build up defenses, you can go out exploring the world, but you can also try to resolve conflict through assassination, stealth or diplomacy, so that a fight isn’t the only way out! So, chose your style and save Thea from the Darkness!

There are five key elements to our gameplay: Village Management & Crafting; Resource Gathering; Card Minigame; Story Driven Events and Exploration!

• Manage your village: You will need to decide how to best use the limited resources at your disposal, both in terms of supplies and manpower. You may choose to devote more men to building a new house, but then who will go out and find the resources? Or on the flip side, if you send out too many people, will your village be safe? Thea: The Awakening will based on a Day Turn and a Night Turn and during the long nights, your village is exposed to all manners of encounters and events, including simple attacks by hungry scavengers, or a mystical plague brought on by the Night Horrors...
• Send out parties to seek out resources: Sending out scouting parties is not just a matter of choosing the direction. Many events will have different outcomes or dialogue options depending on who is in your party, so choose wisely! A wise woman may be frail and thus you risk losing her on the road, but if you come across an unknown creature, she may be the one to save your hide!
• Enter into a unique card minigame: resolve combat, social encounters, physical challenges, disease and more! Your people become your deck as you face your challenge in the tactical card minigame, so choose your party wisely.
• Discover the many strange creatures lurking in the shadows: Yes there is an abundance of creatures, both beast and man, who will inevitably attack your parties and village, for treasure, for the kill or simply out of hunger and desperation. But, not all of your encounters must end with a fight, nor will all fights start off in an obvious way! You may meet a lost child and wonder if it's a trick, or you may meet a beast and end up talking it out... Will those flickering lights in the distance offer guidance and warmth, or will they lead you astray?
• Explore the map and discover new locations: Our maps are randomly generated, so with each playthrough you will get a whole new world to explore! There will be forgotten ruins, forlorn forests, misty swamps or hazardous mountains, where the legends say, Orcs run amok.