And now vember is gone

Only played two games in november, because I spent a lot of time on those. And also played a bunch of TTS with friends (lock-down and all that jazz).

Eador. Imperium

3/10

41.7 hours

18 of 32 achievements

Lore / Story : It's some fantasy world and the land is split into islands surrounded by void. The story in the campaign might as well not exist. I think it's a follow up on Eador: Genesis, but I'm not even sure.
Game mechanics : It's a turn based strategy game. So let's go into the details of each part of the gameplay
- Overall map: The map is cut into tiles. You have your heroes moving in between tiles. They can then explore a part of one tile each turn to discover some dungeon or just allow it to receive more people.
  The tiles that have yet to be explored are often occupied by neutral troops of varying strength. Once you explore a tile, it's part of your realm.
  At some point you'll encounter opponents and steamroll through their realm to siege the castle and end them.
- Tile content: So just to go into more details into the things you can find in tiles. It can be a lot of things. Most of the time it's a dungeon, and it'll tell you the overall number of troops and the type of troops. But no indication whatsoever of what is the strength of those units. So you'll have to remember each unit strength just to get an idea of the strength of the dungeon.
- Realm management: You only have one city, in which you can construct one building/turn. There is hundreds of building to chose from with different effects, with multiple dependency in between them. It's sometimes hard to remember where you're going.
  And you have up to 3 construction per tile in your realm. The available constructions are unlocked by buildings from your city. It's a chore to keep them all up to date when your realm grows.
- Hero management: Heroes have can be given items/units/spells. Nothing out of the ordinary. The only point to note is that your heroes skills cap are limited by your hero level.
  In game your heroes will spend most of their turn doing nothing but exploring one tile. And then you'll wonder if he can take on the dungeon content.
  You have a bunch of hero classes. But damn are they inequals. There is 3 main archetype. Fighter, Mage, Commanders. Fighter heroes can take whole armies by themselves when well equipped/leveled. Mages are laughably weak. Commander are alright if you manage to get the high level troops (but this takes a while).
- Combat: The combat is just turn based combat. Nothing special about it. It's a bit slow, because the map is big and sometimes it'll just be 2 or 3 turn of unit movement before the fight actually start.
Campaign progression: Unlike the previous version, nothing progresses in between scenario. You are dealt a different starting hand, but that's about it.
Difficulty / Length : So the game difficulty is pretty random. But when it's hard, it's because the scenario/AI is cheating. Like the AI having one of the best unit unit in the game super early on (way before you can have the equivalent). And when there is no cheat, it's just a slog to go through it. It took me 35 hours to do the first 4 scenario of the campaign. 9 hours per scenario. And those hours were mostly spent exploring my own realm.
Conclusion : I remembered Eador : Genesis fondly. But damn is this one a let down. It's so freaking slow. And not interesting at all (be it in combat or management). Oh and oftentimes it crashes for no reasons. Definitely not going to bother going through the 100+ hours needed to finish all campaigns.

And this one is not finished, but because it’s a roguelike dungeon crawler, I think I got the gist of it now.

Darkest Dungeon

7/10

38.0 hours

43 of 120 achievements

Lore / Story : Your ancestor made some eldritch shit and the familial estate has gone to shit. You have to explore it and try to fix whatever he did. The general ambiance of the game is supposed to be very dark and oppressing and that's very well done in that regard.
Game mechanics : In case you didn't know the game, it's a roguelike dungeon crawler. The But you gather resources that allow to improve your heroes throughout the run. There are a bunch of thing to pay attention to (hunger , light , health, stress) and you have to manage them with different tools given to you.
The fight are turn based, with a system of positioning that can change during the fight. Some skills of you/your opponents can only be used in some position/target some positions. It makes for interesting strategic choice/target prioritization and overall a very satisfying combat system.
There are 4 or 5 different area in which dungeon are located, and each has different kind of opponents/environment properties. As such a party for one area, might not be optimal for another one.
Base progression : Be it loot in the dungeon or rewards for runs, you'll gain some heirlooms. Those can be used to upgrade the different buildings in you hamlet.
Upgrading those helps upgrading your heroes/keeping them fresh. It takes time to upgrade everything, so you'll have to chose wisely which one you're prioritizing first.
Character progression : When you finish a dungeon the surviving heroes get some xp. You'll also get some gold. And some trinkets. Gold can be used to upgrade skills (very little change, only some numbers going up) or buy new skills. But you're limited to 4 skill, so it's a matter of unlocking/upgrading the ones you like.
You can also use gold to upgrade your base equipment (same thing, it's just some numbers going up/down).
And you win plenty of trinket during the game. A lot of those have positive and negative effect. Each hero can equip 2. You have to juggle between trinkets to equips the optimal trinkets for each character/dungeon, but they're the one thing that allow you to really customize a character.
Also because some character will be unavailable for some runs (due to stress, illness, a level that's too high or others thing) you'll have to change your party composition often. Which is good, there are plenty of characters to chose from and they all are really different.
Difficulty / Length : The game is hard. You will lose some heroes to bad RNG or bad preparation on your part. Or just because your party isn't made to fight the boss (presuming you don't use the wiki to spoil everything). The game is probably quite long as well (haven't finished it yet, but at the current pace, I expect 50 to 60 hours to "finish it")
Conclusion : So I like the game. I'd recommend it if you like turn based games or roguelike dungeon crawlers. But at the same time there are some aspect that I don't like and find very frustrating making it hard to recommend to everyone.
- There is no way in game to remind you of what happened in the previous runs (e.g. what opponents/curios you have already met at some place).
  So you're often drawn to the wiki (or you have to take your own notes, but that's just to bothersome when the wiki exists) just to get an overview of what you can expect in certain areas. I'm starting to remember it a bit after 40 hours of playtime.
  And that's needed because you'll want to do some optimization for high level dungeons.
- I don't know why, but I can't bring myself to play the game for a long time in a row. I have to do something else after doing 1 or 2 runs.
- That very frustrating feeling you'll get when you have to give up on a bunch of interesting loot just because your inventory is really small (and its size can't be improved).
- The rewards for the highest levels runs feel a bit lackluster compared to easier runs. The only real difference is in the reward presented when you chose the missions, and it ain't much once you have a solid trinket base.
End game edit : So I'm going to reach the end game soonish, and those last hours have forced me to lower the game note.
- Some kind of ability are very class limited. There are plenty of tanks/dps, but there is only one AoE Heal, and one AoE stress relief.
- The end game is tedious. Because of a certain mechanism (not going to spoil it here), the end game takes longer that it needs to be. And as such you end up doing a lot of run that feel samey.
- Linked to that, it takes a lot of runs to unlock the latest bosses (at least 5 long run per location). As such you're not even enticed to get them all before going to the darkest dungeon because it takes so much time.
- And during that end game your characters/hamlet evolution is close to none. You already have everything interesting maxed out and all the trinkets that interest you
- The trinket merchant is a bit useless : At the start you have no gold for it but need trinkets -> you can't buy. At the end you have gold but already plenty of trinkets -> you won't buy.