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I was curious about peoples hidden gems. One never knows what one can find when it comes to gaming. I’ll start with a game I recently wrote about in a different thread.

Thea: the awakening. Also kind of shoe horning in the sequel Thea 2: the shattering.

Overall: The Thea games are a wonderful mix of rpg, card game, 4X and management. They are very similar to a small scale civilization in a Slavic fantasy setting.

Presentation: The game has a Slavic theme with enemies like Baba Yaga and leeshys. The music is stellar. There’s just one voice actor though reading the quests to you, which is alright but not great. The artwork on cards and enemies are also great. You really feel like the developers cared greatly for the setting.

Gameplay: You only have a single settlement and send out expositions. Expeditions move around the map to collect resources, do quests and explore. Monsters roam and attack you, but if you attack them you have more ways of dealing with them, depending on your villagers skills. Each villager is represented by a card. Every card can be equipped for various roles. You chose a god at the start of each run. The chosen god changes some quests, always have a unique quest (albeit very similar) quest and gives you various in game options. Some gods really changes how the game is played. There’s meta progress when a run ends in the form of a god leveling up and providing more benefits. Also you unlock more gods.

Story: Every game has the same overarching story but you get variance through random events, quests and ways to deal with problems. In the first game the story goes that the cosmic tree burned and an age of darkness came. Your people barely survived, protected by what little power your chosen god had left. Now the sun is back and you need to survive and find out what happened that made the world go dark. More and more powerfull enemies also awake with the sun however so you need to prepare. The second game has the opposite theme. The world is for some reason splitting apart. A unnatural lights is stealing peoples souls and challenge the gods. You need to face of against this light.

Issues: The game is not without it's faults. After a few rounds you’ll recognize most of the events. Tech progression is very strangely handled in the first game. It’s based on the items you craft, better items give more tech. Combat is cool but can feel unfair. Oh and the games can get difficult to manage when you have 20+villagers all with 8 equipment slots to handle.

Recommendation: Overall the Thea games are rough gems but a high recommend. I’d say if you enjoy stuff like frost punk and civilization and also like fantasy then you will enjoy Thea.

So what are you gaming gems? I’d love to hear about them.

Edit: decided to break my recommendation into chunks because it wasn’t and easy read haha. Also added a little bit in some categories.