Thea: The Awakening

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.

More information.

RPGWatch Steam Curation:

Great blend of 4 x strategy, rogue lite and crafting survival elements. Nice Slavic mythology setting, high replay value and card minigames - Perfect!

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Highly addictive little game here, I figure I have played it for about 20 hours already.
Though the first 5 hours were learning the game with a lot of re-starts.

Does the card game get really tactical or repetitive ?

How much is story or other factions ?

And what proportion of the game is really survival ?

Pladio said:

Does the card game get really tactical or repetitive ?

How much is story or other factions ?

And what proportion of the game is really survival ?

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I'm not a fan of the card game and find it totally repetitive, but there is some tactics to it due to a variety of skills for your support deck.

The story is scattered into events, but there's some decent depth to the writing for it. But, being a roguelike, the story is fairly short once you can conquer the RNG. There are no other factions in the traditional 4X sense. It's your 1 unexpandable village vs the roaming monsters of the world. As you play, you can XP for the chosen god which unlocks passive abilities for your followers next time. I think there's 6 different gods, and they all have a slightly different flavor, but nothing game breaking that I've seen yet. God choice does impact some quest options.

Survival in the sense that people die, a lot, especially on higher difficulty levels. The RNG can doom you before you get a chance to start. IE Crappy start position, low gathering skills, multiple high level dens spawned nearby. Food and burning materials are required to sustain the city and expeditions, but the act of collecting them isn't hard, dealing with the monsters to do it safely is. Citizens can randomly create children which can grow to adults. They can die in events, and also be gained from events. The rate seems to be reduced greatly at higher levels, or maybe I've just been super unlucky, making deaths to key contributors a potentially huge problem. You can also attract characters to your cities based on materials used in building construction.

All that being said, I can't stop playing this game. I've put in nearly 14 hours, beat it once on easy, unlocked all the gods, and got stomped down my first several attempts on True God of Thea difficulty. The crafting system is fairly interesting with stats really being determined by a combination of the base and secondary material (catalyst has little to no impact it seems). Better components obvious give better items.

The variety of quests/events support a wide array of character abilities creating situations where taking your gatherer outside the city for supply runs can actually get you through a difficult random event.

Done with D:OS EE. Time for Thea

Well I decided to get it to try it out...
I usually don't like survival games but this basically looks like a single player civ game with some added charm to complement gameplay.

Probably won't last long in it but it might be fun.

I don't know what is its about this game but I can't put it down either.

I have beaten it once and on my another play through on a larger map which makes it even harder. It is very simple, yet so random and hard. Just play it.

I have decided to give it a quick try and it took 4 hours chunk out of my day! As Celtic says - simple yet addictive!

I give it a thumbs up. Two very different starts. With the second one being like a population exploding. I think I have around 24 people even with a few deaths.
Don't attack a dragon, always recon in force.
It is sort of mesmerizing, partially due, I think, to the placid melodic medieval music.

Modern "trash talk" style of dialogues is a bit of a let down though.

I have 14 people in my village on right now, a few are creatures and 11 in my party that is out adventuring. I got a Striga bat in my party it has the highest hit points I have seen.

I am playing on a huge map and not sure about this as it is huge, going to end another party soon just to cover things.

When you come across slavers if you can beat them with social most of the times you can get all 4 of the children that is a big help. Though last play through I was able to get a couple of medic's and a witch for healing, I having this time and it is hard to keep my villagers alive when you get hit.

Is there any way to attract orcs to your village?So far I had elfs, ghosts, dwarfs, multiple kinds of beats in my population but still no orcs.

Nameless one said:

Is there any way to attract orcs to your village?So far I had elfs, ghosts, dwarfs, multiple kinds of beats in my population but still no orcs.

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Enchanted bones and steel when you build your barracks gives you a plus one for orcs. Not sure if using better material like silver would increase that I didn't have enough to try.

CelticFrost said:

Enchanted bones and steel when you build your barracks gives you a plus one for orcs. Not sure if using better material like silver would increase that I didn't have enough to try.

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Thanks.IIRC silver like mithril and ancient wood only boost basic stats of a building.I never experimented much with enchanted bones(I never really focused that much on magic so I usually don't research them) as they don't drop much, even dragon bones and mithril are found more often as loot.

I played it for a bit last night.

Game shows a lot of potential but I feel like some of the elements will turn out to be pretty repetitive quite quickly.

I think they should maybe have had that card game for everything but actual combat and have a proper turn based combat system for it.

The reason for this is that after a few of the challenges (I.e. Card battles) I already think I get the hang of it and adding a bit more variety would be nice.

Will probably try to finish it once.

zahratustra said:

Modern "trash talk" style of dialogues is a bit of a let down though.

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Thus spake zahratustra. Yes that is a bit of a drag. Its usually the third response where they fall into colloquial expression, which really does not seem to fit well with the setting.
In general I would give the writing and dialogue a C+ to B-. The story is merely OK and at least bearable to read.
I got a Dwarven Smith and a wolf.

A good exposition.

Instant buy from me when it hits GoG

Nameless one said:

Is there any way to attract orcs to your village?So far I had elfs, ghosts, dwarfs, multiple kinds of beats in my population but still no orcs.

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Orcs - Steel
Dwarfs - Gold
Demons - Enchanted Bones & Dragon Bones
Goblins - Dark Wood & Obsidian
Beasts - Monster Bones
Elves - Elven Wood

http://muhagames.com/thea/material-abilities/

The problem is, you generally only get +1 to attract for Orcs and Dwarfs, unless you're building Palisades.


For crafting, Dragon Bones & Ancient Leather are you best friends with both adding Leech damage.