this is a pretty nice game, only lacking in clarity and balance. it’s not clear what the goal is towards the end, and I found that the game drags on for too long while fumbling around after the sun gate. there’s a brief voice line that says something about killing someone, but good luck after that lol.
it’s hard to have a strategy because of three glaring problems (all solved by meta-knowledge that is unreasonable to burden the player with):
- there’s no way to see what tokens you have in the vase (and it’s unreasonable to keep track manually)
- there’s no way to know what enemies to bribe as their trade offers are hidden until bribed (unless you play multiple times and remember every enemy’s trade offer)
- it’s not clear enough which enemies you are suppose to kill in order to win after the sun gate (unless you understood what the voice was telling you and memorized the enemies that were shown at that time, or just guess that the biggest enemies are the ones you need to kill)
on my first attempt, I ended up without any green tokens towards the end, and no way to get any new green tokens as the deck seemed to cycle through the same trade offers repeatedly… and the enemy I think I needed to kill required green tokens.
on my second attempt, I was careful to keep a few of every token by not trading much at all. I eventually realized who I needed to kill (hint: it’s the enemies with lots of tokens on them), and I won on that attempt with nearly 100 hp left.
in the end, the game has a lot of interesting mechanics, but they don’t work together very well. it seems like the best way to win is to keep killing everyone, and only bribe if it saves you from being cursed — preventing additional cursed tokens from being added to the vase is the primary priority, and not much else seems to matter. I like the mechanics in concept, especially the push-your-luck betrayal, so it’s a shame that the dominant strategy is to avoid interacting with everything. the game just needs more playtesting and tuning… and a way to turn off the spinning background.