Astral Ascent

Despite some annoyances, an amazing game with high replayability Positive: Great voice acting, won't see it any better in movies. Ayla's voice gives me the strongest Janet Varney vibe (who played korra), but it's not her. However, as much as I like the voice acting per se, I think it should be faster per se. Everyone speaks extremely slow. Gameplay becomes a lot of fun after the initial getting-wrekt, unless the RNG hates you - which it does quite often Artwork/character design is amazing. Two exceptions: I dislike the name of the main character. The second one gets their own mention in the negative list. Hands down the most creative Roguelite I have ever seen when it comes to game mechanics. So many different types of levels and enhancements. The dev(s) keep making free additions to the game and updating it, giving you new types of rooms, so that each run is truly unique. The music is so chill and good, it doesn't get old at all. Pretty much 95% of all games I play for this amount of time (at the time of first drafting this 10 hours), I have already muted at half the playing time because the music had gotten obnoxious fast. I am now at 70 hours and still have not muted the music. Everybody should have a friend like Zim-Zim Neutral the interactions between characters, respectively their dialogues and backstories, are 100% hit or miss. Either pretty cool or pretty cringe. Nothing inbetween. Negative Biggest point of critique is the RNG. Many times, even the very first Auras you get to choose from at the start, offered by the dragon, are Auras that just strengthen existing effects. When you start out you don't have any existing effects. So I've had several runs that were doomed from the start because I was literally offered 3 such Auras that were completely useless to me (and I depend on more RNG to even have a chance that they might benefit me in any way later on). The Aura RNG is downright awful. I've had several runs where I was offered Auras 3 times and 3 times all of the 3 offered were useless. The Spells RNG isn't much better. At the time of writing this, I had unlocked 48 Spells for the main character. However it feels like it's always the same 15-20 showing up, two spells hadn't shown up at all (but have in the meantime, now at 70 hours) Quite often (like maybe 30% of all times) the tooltip descriptions of gambits don't show up. sometimes it can be fixed by just walking out of sight, and then returning to the gambit. But sometimes it just won't...

Why is it so fun? Simple and not. Hack and slash but weak af some runs while OP on others. It hooked me. Simple controls and spam hitting but also a little intelligence required. Perfect mix.