I absolutely love roguelikes and roguelites. I really enjoy the overwhelming difficulty that you have to face, whilst creating a powerful build to overcome the adversities and snowball out of control.

There’s this sense of urgency to not get out-scaled, to take risks, and to possibly get rewarded for making smart choices – or to die trying.

What’s even better is just the way that a lot of roguelikes, especially roguelike-deck-builders, innovate the much-seen formula of procedurally generated dungeon-crawling, resource management and permadeath.

Little Leo Games’ debut title, Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles is a roguelike-deckbuilder that is based on dice. The game has you saving the star system by embodying one of six brave oracles, each with their own unique dice sets, abilities and playstyles, ridding the world of its corruption and purifying those taken over.

Developer: Little Leo Games
Publisher: Akupara Games
Genre: Indie, Dice-Based Roguelike-Deckbuilder
Release Date: September 21st, 2023
Reviewed on: PC
Available on: PC
Copy was provided by Akupara Games.

Astrea takes heavy inspiration from a board game called “Quarriors”, the complexity of Magic: The Gathering, and some elements from Slay the Spire – as Leonardo Castanho from Little Leo Games has told me previously. Here’s the full interview, btw!

In fact, Astrea’s structure is practically identical to Slay the Spire in that you go through maps consisting of floors with branching paths but it sets itself apart from its inspiration by embracing six characters, each with a unique approach to combat, as well as dice that come in three broad categories.

There are safe dice, balanced dice, and risky dice. Striking a balance between the three categories is key to survival as effects vary and you don’t want to get outscaled by enemies.

Whereas safe dice have mostly positive effects, their effects are minor compared to the other two. Balanced dice come with 3-4 positive sides and some risks. Risky dice come with only 2-3 positive sides but are incredibly powerful if you’re okay with taking a risk – and due to the amount of rerolls at your disposal through the virtues and the like, taking a risk is often well worth it. 

Safe dice will carry you through early encounters. You have this purification bar on the screen that you could easily mistake for a health bar. Essentially, you can skip playing most dice but you’ll always have to place red dice.

Blue dice apply purification, filling up your purification bar and reducing enemies’ “health”, whereas red dice apply corruption and always have to be played, either reducing your purification bar or possibly healing enemies. 

This sounds pretty simple but there’s just such a huge array of interesting and complex mechanics in the game, from Sentinels that aid you in battle, helping you out a little bit, to dice-discarding, time-bending, debuffing, resource-burning and other shenanigans to a plethora of unique ways for you to utilize self-corruption and self-purification to unleash powerful combos onto your foes.

Whereas enemies will have their health in the hundreds at times, you’re always limited to your seven bars of purification, and your three points of health. 

Some enemies can kill you many times over in a single turn if you don’t play your ca- I mean dice right. Get the right rolls, target the right enemies, and unleash absolutely glorious plays. This is also why you can’t just go with only safe dice as they won’t be able to handle the sheer amount of corruption coming your way!

Going from near-death to full purification multiple times in a single fight, often with a purpose, utilizing the virtues you gain access to this way, and skillfully outmanoeuvring incredibly difficult bosses… or just embarrassing myself by misplaying and over-corrupting myself… it’s great. I love it. It’s just so darn unique and satisfying.

Adding to the satisfaction, dice are thrown across the screen whenever it’s time to draw, and I just love seeing it. It’s “cute” and such a nice little touch! A gimmick, for sure, but it just presses the buttons in my head really well whenever it happens.

Then, there are the different characters which all play vastly differently and add some extra spice to runs in their own way. Cellarius, for instance, is this “Warrior” type character that can apply “Wave” and then invoke special effects using that – but he also has a virtue allowing him to hit multiple times which pairs well with certain debuffs and buffs. 

My absolute favourite character so far is probably Hevelius, “The Ancient Warden”, who has these two sentinels from the get-go that you can buff up to heal you, take damage for you or possibly deal damage themselves… and I just really love how you can break and repair them or refresh their dice to conjure powerful effects and combos. I even managed to go infinite once with a draw-focused build which is always a pleasure.

And well, as for the other characters, I don’t wanna spoil anything… but also I can say that they’re super interesting and I suck at them. I just gotta get better and take my time but I’m just having so much fun with Hevelius, at the moment… But I’m pretty sure that there should be a character for everyone in the game. 

There are some unlock conditions for them, though, and each character can also unlock new dice and artefacts via a level-up system – which is pretty spicy.

Astrea has me enamoured! I absolutely adore the game’s art direction with the blue-and-purple-ish colour palette, the moving elements in the background, as well as the cute little animations for your oracle and sentinels… Chef’s kiss!

The dice design and UI also are just so nice to look at, especially thanks to a plethora of cool elements that make this whole game really look the part. I mean, you gotta save the Star System and you cannot do that without at least some swagger, right?

It’s a beautiful game with an incredibly fitting orchestral soundtrack that never overstays its welcome. Now, with orchestral sounds, it can often just seem very samey but Astrea’s score has some rather distinct melodies that I’ve been humming on the bus because they’re just so serene and whimsical – and I may have been listening to the title screen music this whole time while writing the review. It’s just that good!

But as much as I love the game with its unique and fabulous aesthetic and the incredibly intriguing and complex gameplay, I do have some gripes with it.

Runs sometimes feel a bit slow and take some time to get going. That’s fine, in and of itself, I think… but once you’re over the early chapters, you often can find yourself in incredibly powerful positions with nothing standing in your way. It feels like the difficulty curve just flatlines at one point if you get lucky enough – so, some balancing there would be nice. Don’t make it punishingly hard and frustrating, of course, but just add some extra spice later on, maybe?

Perhaps more importantly, though, I wish they added more guidance to via damage projection. Take a look at Slay the Spire, for this: When you wanna attack a target, it shows you how much damage they’ll take, right? Why can’t we have this in here as well? I’d love to see that. I would love to see how much corruption or purification I’ll take/deal with after a turn plays out or before I use a dice. That’d be pretty great!

Maybe if this is too much handholding for the devs, it could be something that you can turn off in the settings. That would appease the core gamers out there, as well, probably.

Attacks do show numbers but sometimes, Cellarius will deal double purification or double corruption with an effect and you just don’t see it in the dice and end up losing a hard by accident. I find that frustrating, personally. It’s perhaps even unintuitive.

But despite the slow early game and the lacklustre damage projection, I can’t help but return to Astrea, going for “just one more run”, accidentally skipping dinner and completely messing up my sleep schedule… again.

I love purifying these corrupted beings and swinging from near-death experience to full purification bar within seconds, conjuring a storm of endless draw and frankly overpowered builds that I was quite proud of… and then losing it all to a few miscalculations…

Flying too close to the sun gets your wings burned, after all, and my hubris was my downfall. Guess it’s time to start again from the beginning. This time for sure! Oh, shit, it’s suddenly 2 in the morning…

It’s just so darn fun and incredibly satisfying.

I highly recommend Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles to all fans of roguelike-deck-builders such as Monster Train and Slay the Spire! You will definitely find a lot of joy in Astrea’s complexity and potential!

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well.