Aethermancer

An absolute gem of a turn-based roguelite! It has a plethora of interesting systems and a lot of challenges to overcome. Honestly, all that you have to know is that the most upvoted negative review of this game has 80h+ played on it at review time and played another 10hs after that. The game is that good. I'm not really into creature collectors or pixel-art but this game is great as a team building turn based roguelie! Every monster has a signature trait and a couple of types that define it (tank, weakness, shield - for instance). You build a team of 3, level them up with skills and powerful traits. On top of that you have strong equipments to use and summoner items. That's a _ton_ of possible combinations and strategies to go on. I'll also say that all the monsters feel strong/viable and have a good design both in abilities and visual appearance. It's really a great game to fire up for a run. Runs exceedingly well on the Steam Deck. It's cool to get into. The game is difficult, you can wipe on your first encounter if you're not careful and even the normal encounters stay difficult later into the game. You have a lot of strategic possibilities to overcome these challenges. You also have a good amount of meta progression, some upgrades can be bought in town for currency and using a monster also gains it "worthiness" which makes that specific monster type stronger. You can even "catch" the bosses which feels very cool. If I had to put a "beware" sign up around systems it'd be these: * many monsters have escalating mechanics, i.e. after some turns they might one shot one of your monsters (who die for the entire run), the health system is also interesting as you basically get permanent damage from strong hits so you start combat with less than max HP (but you can heal up during combat again). All of this together means you need a good amount of defensive utility, while you don't want the combat to go on too long (as the enemies also become stronger/you take more damage). * the exploration on the map is lackluster to me, i.e. I could do without it and just go combat to combat, it feels like it's pretty much only there to show off the admittedly pixel-art * the final boss feels a bit too easy - or rather, most of the time I get to him, I manage to kill him. This might just be a factor of filtering my other runs out before on normal encounters or other bosses if they are too weak. But really, overall a great game I cna highly recommend, esp. if you love turn-based combat and roguelites. I'm eager to see what more content the devs will add!