Thea is a hard game for me to review, because I'm having a hard time deciding if I like or hate it.
Seriously, I find myself playing Thea for a couple days straight, deciding that it's just too boring and repetitive, and barely deciding not to delete it. Then a few days later, I find myself firing it up for a few games to get one of my deities to the next level.
I think the best unified comment I can give is that the concept and design of the game as a whole are very compelling, but it starts to get repetitive because there just isn't enough different on each playthrough. If there were many more of the interesting story vignettes, and if they were triggered more based on what you are doing instead of randomly, the story of each individual game could get compelling. But as it is, every playthrough starts to feel the same, both in what happens on the map and in what vignettes I see. The first dozen or two games were satisfying to me as a builder, but eventually there just weren't enough different viable approaches to building up my village and people. Even playing with a radically different deity doesn't change the actual goals much, it just makes some of the basic ones easier or free.
Unlocking and levelling the deities gives a strong pull to my completionist streak, and I think that's what draws me back. But it's becoming such a grind of playing the same game with nothing new, multiple times to get those deity exps.
All that said, the game is not AAA-priced, either. I have some hope that it will do well enough at the $20 price point that the developers will either do a cheap/free expansion with jillions more vignettes, or start from scratch to make the underlying code more able to include interesting conditions from a merely significantly-expanded pool.
Seriously, I find myself playing Thea for a couple days straight, deciding that it's just too boring and repetitive, and barely deciding not to delete it. Then a few days later, I find myself firing it up for a few games to get one of my deities to the next level.
I think the best unified comment I can give is that the concept and design of the game as a whole are very compelling, but it starts to get repetitive because there just isn't enough different on each playthrough. If there were many more of the interesting story vignettes, and if they were triggered more based on what you are doing instead of randomly, the story of each individual game could get compelling. But as it is, every playthrough starts to feel the same, both in what happens on the map and in what vignettes I see. The first dozen or two games were satisfying to me as a builder, but eventually there just weren't enough different viable approaches to building up my village and people. Even playing with a radically different deity doesn't change the actual goals much, it just makes some of the basic ones easier or free.
Unlocking and levelling the deities gives a strong pull to my completionist streak, and I think that's what draws me back. But it's becoming such a grind of playing the same game with nothing new, multiple times to get those deity exps.
All that said, the game is not AAA-priced, either. I have some hope that it will do well enough at the $20 price point that the developers will either do a cheap/free expansion with jillions more vignettes, or start from scratch to make the underlying code more able to include interesting conditions from a merely significantly-expanded pool.
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