Thea: The Awakening - Preview @ Highland Arrow

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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.

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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