August Assassination #2 (SG Win/ PoP Pick)

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If you're tired of AAA games, please play Crown Gambit. It will show you that there is still a lot of energy and creativity in the indie scene. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, this game is good.

Starting with the obvious -- this game looks incredible. Fantastic, Inspiring. It's insane how well it looks. The graphical style is pretty unique and consistent throughout the game. Character design, menus, animations, locations, cutscenes, everything gels together and enhances the beautiful artistry on display. The cards, the enemies, the Paladins, everything is so consistent, that it becomes very hard to fault the game visually. Literally every frame could be a cutscene (maybe except for the battles themselves), and the game doesn't rely only on 2D art, also having incredible 3D effects and animation interacting with the 2D elements. It's chef's kiss, really.

Sound-wise, it's fine. I never got tired of the soundtrack, but it's nothing to write home about. The moments with vocal backgrounds are standouts, but they are so rare that it's hard to highlight them. Regular sound effects are good but unremarkable. You're not here for the sounds and neither am I, so let's move quickly past it.

Gameplay-wise, it's a happy mix of so many genres recombined. Battles are grid-based deckbuilding bonanza, where you draw skills from a card pool and use action points to either move, attack, or cast a skill. It's a system that's easy to understand, and yet, never gets old and keeps bringing exciting combat encounters based on map layout, environmental effects, size and type of mobs, and unique traits of champions and bosses you face. I played on Normal difficulty and found the beginning a bit hard (when you're still pretty weak and lacking skills), but 1/3 of the way into the game I started blazing through encounters and even bosses. It became risky near the end, when you have a massive gauntlet of boss battles and some duels (my decks were definitely not tailored for duels), but overall I still beat the game without ever letting one of my heroes die.

If you are experienced with deckbuilders like Slay the Spire and its ascensions, except something much easier. Adding the grid and thinking about movement adds somethign to the fold, but it's not overwhelming. If I had to fault the combat, it's mostly because it becomes somewhat repetitive quickly, and the skill trees offer some build variation, but not much. I assume most people will end up with Aliza as a rushdown melee fighter, Rollo as a tank-ish AoE brawler, and Hael as a support/ranged/effects caster, regardless of how they progress through the skill tree. Which is not the end of the world, but is something that could be improved. Part of the skill is choosing which cards to keep and which ones to remove from your deck, but any experienced deckbuilder player should have this as second nature. I will admit that I didn't need to engage with the Ancestral Grace system, so I only touched the surface of the card system and maybe playing on harder difficulty would be more fun in that sense. Same thing for enemies' relics -- I destroyed them all, but some of them seemed to have really fun effects to mess around.

When you're not in combat, you're either in some light-randomized traversal (from node to node, nothing too complex), and interacting with the world in a visual-novel manner. There is a decent amount of choices you can make throughout the game to customize your run and roleplay your characters, and if you want, no two runs will look the same. I thoroughly enjoyed the choices I had to make and how they played out. I wasn't happy with the ending, but I could see how clearly I shaped it and there's satisfaction in that.

Last but not least, the story -- this is a high drama about noble families backstabbign each other, religious factions with swinging loyalties, and a populace ready to revolt. It's entertaining as hell, and the amount of variations in the places you can visit, the characters you can join forces with or rebel against, and the amount of events you will experience is really staggering. I can only imagine how many branching paths you have before you arrive at one of four (or five?) endings. I was a bit troubled with the pacing at first -- it really is a lore dump, but after one or two hours the pace improves a bit and the dump lessens, thus the game becomes easier to follow.

It is an absolute work of passion and symbolizes one of the reasons why I love indie games. It's such a well crafted and polished game, and except for two game-breaking bugs I had after beating certain battles (both already reported on the devs Discord and which just set me back 5-or-so minute each time), it's certainly a game worth your money, full price.