I stumbled upon this game via the soundtrack showing up in my youtube recommended. Must've been some kind of sign, cause I'm a big fan of insect-adjacent games and bugs in general so seeing something so geared to my interests I had to at least check it out. Imagine my pleasant surprise to find out that it was free!
Overall I'd describe Cicadia as a very modest FPS roguelike. It doesn't do anything too outstanding with its fairly bread-and-butter movement shooter mechanics, and it is pretty unremarkable in terms of presentation (though I'm quite fond of the art style, both of the game proper and its cover art), but this is offset by exceptionally strong fundamentals in its gameplay that make it very intuitive to get a grasp of. There's only a few initial trial-and-error learning curves that you'll run into when going in blind, and this alone makes it very easy to pick up and play for an hour or two in a similar vein to roguelikes like Nuclear Throne. Its simplicity really is its greatest strength, and I commend the team for being able to craft what is simply a very addictive experience that I've been finding myself coming back to for the past few days now.
While its normal difficulty doesn't leave much in the way of challenge, and I would say is the best overall experience, it's in trying out its harder difficulties (Mostly "master" and "impossible" mode) that serve as a really fun test of skill, but with the drawback that the cracks in the game's otherwise incredible foundation begin to show a little more.
Most of my issues towards the game focuses on the builds. Most of the time, the builds are fine on their own and I found that each of them were really well-suited to the main room-to-room encounters. However, of the 4 builds Cicadia advertises, it seems like 2 of them are practically worthless when it comes to the bosses. Ideally you'd be using the two initial floors to build up your equipment for the boss, so depending on what you build for it can feel like an uphill battle. The silk build, which is built around stopping enemies in place, does not freeze bosses or even slow them by any considerable metric from what I have seen. Leaning into silk as a result makes you quite disadvantaged during the boss stages, as it heavily hinges solely on your stat boosts rather than your items. The toxins-related build, which is meant to apply damage-over-time to enemies, seems to stop getting applied to bosses after a certain amount of time or after they've accrued enough stacks of it. I'm unsure if this was just a visual glitch, but it didn't seem like it was proccing after a certain point in the fight, which really bumped down my damage-per-second and made me a little sour.
Of the other 2 builds, Stink works as an area-of-effect damage over time, which does not seem to mysteriously stop affecting bosses after a certain point though comes with the issue that, after a while of generating clouds, you become greatly hindered in your ability to see anything. This makes moments which would require precision, such as parries and the many dead man's volleys the game loves to shower you with (ESPECIALLY near the end), all the more difficult to pull off. This is especially glaring in a game that has a notable lack of audible cues, with a majority of its tells being visual if there are any tells at all. On that note, Cicadia could certainly benefit from more audible feedback to a lot of the enemies attacks and the attacks of my own. Especially in a first person shooter such as this, audible feedback can go a long way in preventing damage that could otherwise come across as unfair such as attacks from behind or just outside your peripheral. There are some cases where this is done extremely well, such as the feedback you get when you're playing volleyball with the orb or parrying other enemy projectiles, and this same courtesy being applied to other areas (something as simple as enemies making a sound when you shoot them or when they ready or fire an attack (I'm looking at you, you flighty hornet bastards) could go a long way.
Back on track, however. The final build, moths, is the only build type I would consider fine. There's an obvious novelty to having a swarm of moths absolutely tear the enemies to shreds. it's easily my favourite and I'm very happy with its inclusion, but because it tends to be just a bump better than the other builds, both in its all-around potential and its novelty, it sort of blows the other builds out of the water. Not that I'll complain. Go my moths.
As my final little gripe, unrelated to anything else: there's no way to check mid-run your current stat upgrades or items collected (at least not that I could find), which my forgetful ass could really benefit from when I'm halfway in and blank on what exactly I was building for.
Despite ALL OF THIS though, I would still highly recommend Cicadia. My time with it has been nothing short of extremely fun! The foundation of the game is incredible, it's just a lack of punchiness and minor build gripes that really caused the experience to slant a little for me. However, it's only my delving into the harder difficulties did I begin to even formulate a lot of these criticisms, and most of the issues with the builds I criticisied can be solved soley by mixing and matching with the game's decently sizable item variety to cover the weaknesses of one another, though this is all stuff which I imagine anyone not as autistic as me would probably even bother with. So for anyone looking to kill time with something rather casual this is a match made in heaven.
Cicadia kind of has its claws hooked deep at time of writing, and I'm sure even people who aren't as obsessed would appreciate what it has going for it. I'm just incredibly fond of this cool little game! I'm hoping to squeeze out an Impossible Mode win at some point in the future!! :D
I'm definitely going to be keeping an eye on these developers I think they have a very unique dev identity going that shines through throughout Cicadia and I'm looking forward to what they do next!!!!
P.S there was one time I took damage too close to a wall and I got knocked into the green dimension outside the playable space and careened into the abyss to my death and it was very frightening. I don't want to go to the green dimension again.
