Astatos

Now that chapter 2 has finished, I can say that this my comfort late night decompression reading/game. The music puts me right into that mindset (it's that good!) and my current personal favourite is, currently unreleased, the trial theme in chapter 2, it's just so cozy! Visually, those artists ate! The backgrounds and character sprites are immaculate (seriously those background artists deserve more credit the closer I look) and do quench the thirsty. The game has continued to improve since the Early Access' first release 4 years ago and I enjoy the story enough to look forward for the next update. For what it's worth, it's worth getting in its current state! Although I do recommend it, it does have some design flaws: - An account is [i]required[/i] to play the game, even if you just wanted to play the story and not interact with the multiplayer side of things (which you'll get better luck arranging a session on the Discord). I should not need to give unnecessary information if I just want to play the story. - You don't get enough mementos (coins) to view all interlude scenes (more of a minor inconvenience since the game has replayability and QoL features for a second run to se…

The writing is quite good and shows a great deal of thought on the decisions you are asked to make. The two gods with you are about order/chaos but there is nuance to their stances that can result in some surprising takes. I'm quite looking forward to where things go from here.

The card game is alright, though I'm not huge on card games to begin with, so I can't give a full opinion on how I feel about it. Some fights feel a little overtuned though, and getting hit with the enemy attacking you for 16 HP on the very first turn feels kind of insane to me. It can sometimes feel a little too RNG-based, and I had to restart some fights because of just how tough they were initially. The waiting for each Hero card to proc for their attacks/heals can be a little TOO long at times. Besides that though, the story itself, which was my main drive to play the game, is extremely beautiful as of the current chapter (all of Chapter 2). The art by mamaduo is incredible and the characters all look great. All the men are proper eye candy and there's something for nearly every furry in the character designs. I'm very excited for where the story will take us next. TL;DR if you love furry visual novels you'll enjoy this.

card system from hell do not touch this game edit: rants about the card system Pick a card that matches the Trial card : the fact that this is completely random doesn’t sit right with me. It is the main source to get ENERGY to do anything in this game, yet it is determined by luck. I know that most card games have an aspect of luck in it but not in this way. Sometimes you can get no matching cards and receive no ENERGY, and I know there are cards that can change the trial card element, and there are cards that can be used regardless if it’s the same element or not but it is simply the fact that there’s NOT ENOUGH CARD DRAWS IN THIS GAME which results in NOT HAVING ENOUGH ENERGY TO DO ANYTHING. This is coming from a MUKAKI’S SIDE player point of view, where most of my games is usually just waiting for my opponent to draw as much card as possible and use MUKAKI’s ability to swap my empty hands with my opponent’s full hand which THEN I’ll have enough cards to even generate enough energy to do anything. Suggestion on how to fix this flaw. Each turn instead of drawing 1 card, players draw until they have 5 cards in hand. If player already have 5 cards or more gain 1 energy. Remove h…

meow

The thing is I absolutely love the story and characters. I will mainly play the story mode. The problem is the card game. I have to play this back and forth game with the AI, even if I have “story” difficulty. The supposed easy mode, I am stuck with an impossible game with me stuck in 1 HP. I should have known it this way since I suck at these kind of games, but I thought the easy mode would make it easier to get through the story. I’m pretty sure it’s fun for some of y’all but I’m only here for the story. And ngl I’m tempted to just read the story from YT videos lol Edit: Thank god, I didn't know there was a skip option in the menu. I can actually read without being salty the entire time. I'll try giving the Trials a chance since there are dialogues and story bits in there but maybe later. But besides that, thank you!