Astrea: Six Sided Oracles

Astrea: Six Sided Oracles is a deck-building roguelike with noticeable inspiration from Slay The Spire. Despite this inspiration, however, it manages to hold its own incredibly well, even going so far as potentially being one of my favourite deck-builders of all time.

-  Jacob Sanderson

The plot begins strong yet takes a point of being primarily for worldbuilding, at least early on. It does a fantastic job of setting things in motion, explaining the characters and their motives for being there, and does a good job meshing with the gameplay mechanics. The world used to be pure, yet after a sudden and mysterious corruption spread, causing galactic devastation and killing off the Oracles — people chosen by the Stars to protect the world from corruption. Years later, descendants of the Oracles come together to end the corruption for good.

At the start of each run, you choose an Oracle, which determines your starting deck of Dice, along with your Virtues and sometimes even Blessings, all of which define each Oracle's playstyle. Combat encounters are where the majority of the game takes place. Throughout the levels, you’ll add Dice to your deck, all of which have different abilities on each face. Some are high risk, others are low risk. But the payoff on higher-risk dice is much higher. Players draw a set amount of dice at the beginning of each fight, dependent on certain abilities. These Dice are rolled, and these make up your hand for the turn. Dice can be played on each turn, whilesome Dice must be played to to end your turn. Oftentimes, these are negative Dice, which requires some interesting thinking in terms of the order in which you play them.