Feywood Wanderers

There's a lot going on in Feywood Wanderers. The core gameplay loop (in 'normal' mode) is a Roguelite, turn-based tactical extraction experience. Some meta-progression is featured but there is also brutal permadeath - the effects of which can only partially be mitigated. Your character and all of their level-ups and associated skills will be gone for good when their time comes. Starting out, you'll select a race (each with their own unique statline and powerful 'lineage' skilltree) and equip them as best you can. This is where some of the meta-progression comes in to play; the pool of races you can select from and the archetypes you can give them are both expanded with the 'souls' currency that you accrue during a run. You also have a central stash of gear that is persistent, although anything a character is carrying at the time of death is permanently lost. Once you've created your persona, you dive through a portal and from there move around a top-down biome, navigating the terrain and attempting to overcome enemies in turn-based combat. You'll advance through multiple procedurally-generated realms while attempting to reach and overcome the 'big bad' (or is he?) in a final showdown. The skills and gear you've chosen will go a long way to determining whether or not you make it back alive. There's tons of loot to be found that will enhance your chances - weapons and armour that can be used by all (the game features a classless system in this respect), single use scrolls and other consumables, tomes through which one can learn new abilities and even new 'jobs' or skilltrees. Speaking of skilltrees - there's a lot. You start with access to basic classes that fall under a broader category (the monk is classed as a 'hermit' for example). Known skilltrees are unlocked by reaching a numeric threshold - to be a Paladin for example, one needs four 'hermit' and one 'warrior' skills from any qualifying 'job'. As you may have guessed, the potential for build theory-crafting and replayability is enormous. There's no such thing as a 'dump' stat when building your character as they all contribute something positive - Strength and Willpower both increase your carrying capacity along with their other benefits, Agility is useful if you want to hit things (and not be hit in return), Cunning allows you to see stealthy enemies and increases your crit rate and severity, Intelligence dictates how many active skills you can learn from tomes and Constitution will keep you alive when things inevitably get rough. Crafting is featured too - although in the modding rather than creating sense. You'll come across several varieties of 'sprout' during your travels; these can be used to alter the properties of pretty much any item. With enough persistence, you can modify even garbage tier gear into legendary items. I get the feeling the dev may be a Disgaea fan as increasing the level of an item involves using a 'dimension sprout' to enter it and defeat its denizens. All of this though is more realistically late or postgame content that you'll only dabble in during your initial forays. Final thoughts from my own experience? This is a tough, at times utterly unforgiving game (RIP my Wood Elf sneaky boi archer who got one-shot by a fat blob) yet it remains compelling through its depth of interlinked systems and freedom of action given to the player. A solid recommend.

So the game just came out to early access. I've played for about 4 hours (total with the demo), in that time ive leveled 4 characters to about lvl 15. It feels like the dev really tried their best to make a good game. I've encountered no bugs (aside from 1 typo). There is a decent variety in classes, gear, spells, arenas. The GUI feels well thought out and easy to navigate. Where it comes down for me is the gameplay. The gameplay loop is essentially: kill monsters, level up, kill monsters with bigger numbers. There is no quests, no bosses, no final objective (it seems). There is nothing to discover or prepare for. All of the maps are just squares of different color. After you've played this game for 20 minutes you've seen all of the game. The builds feel very planned. The game has some roguelite aspects - you can stockpile gear for next runs. All this gear is equippable at lvl 1, so you just gear up your super-puper OP exterminator right away and then spend the next half an hour grinding out levels. The game has a "classless" system. Which is technically true. However most of the abilities and gear are very specific to a certain playstyle and element. You want to max out only one weapon type and only one element. For that reason all the various spells the game gives you are largely unusable for any given build. 99% of the time I just autoattacked. All of my deaths seemed extremely unfair and all to the same thing. You can choose between several different levels to go next when you've cleared the one you are on. Choose wisely because they have wildly different power level of enemies. Every one of my lvl 15 characters died on lvl 3 of item dimension to the first mob, after completely steamrolling lvl 2, oneshotting everything, with mobs not being able to do as much as a scratch to my character. TLDR The game started out as really fun but left a bad taste. Deaths are unfair and punishing. There is no variety and nothing to look forward to. Felt like ive wasted 4 hours of my life

This game caught me by surprise. I played the demo with 0 expectations and found myself playing several runs instantly, triggering a buy from me. I like the build customization in this one and see myself playing this quite some hours. If you are doubting try the demo!

I wanted to like this so bad. It has pretty much everything I like in a game. But it just feels like nothing is cohesive. Scaling makes no sense; weapons will randomly scale with different stats "just because" even among similar weapons, and so will spells. For example, some fire spells scale with intelligence, some scale with Willpower, and some scale with... Strength?! Why? The dev doesn't even know. On the topic of spells, all elements feel the same; they all leave the same colored "smoke" effect that deals DoT. And I do mean literally a smoke PNG with different colors. For game modes, you have two. A normal rogulite one and a "Lone Wolf" roguelike one. Both modes are incredibly unbalanced. In the roguelite one, you get to trivialize the difficulty curve by bringing endgame equipment to floor one, and you'll inevitably end up with two types of runs, one where you stockpile resources and items, and one where you steamroll everything with the resources you gathered. None of which are particularly fun. On the topic of the afterthought "roguelike" mode, you don't get to unlock anything or interface with most of the mechanics. It doesn't even have a UI; it plops you into the world, and you have to intuit that you can talk to NPCs to pick starting gear and race, because you spawn as a regular human. That also means that in this mode you don't have access to any of the unlockable classes. The roguelike mode was clearly not thought out or implemented properly, and it's there to "please the roguelike crowd", which shows in the way it is simply shoehorned in. This is especially bad given that you won't have access to a lot of the content when playing the roguelike mode because the game just wasn't built around it. And to top that off, if you try one mode, it deletes your save for the other mode. They share the same save slot. I feel like this game would be significantly better if it just decided what it wanted to be and actually committed to it instead of trying to be 20 different things and half-assing all of them. If you visit the game's Discord and lurk for a bit, you'll see that the dev clearly cares about the project, but it doesn't feel like he ever takes it seriously. He doesn't know why half the things are the way they are, or what is and isn't possible in his own game, like he was just implementing things without rhyme or reason, and that comes across in the final product. You'll see dozens of people asking why X or Y works as it does, or how certain things interact, to which the response is usually "idk dude". This is wild to me. How can someone care this little about their own game? There's some really cool stuff here, but overall it gets lost amid the incredibly underwhelming format the game takes place in, with no proper UI, two different game modes that both miss the mark for opposite reasons, poor balancing of areas and playstyles, and inconsistent design. On a more positive note, the game DOES look quite good when you're not interacting with mismatched icons or placeholder art. The foundations are solid, even if the content built on top of it is shaky. It would be a fine early access title, but it is a 3/10 final release.

super good; hope it continues to receive content, because at the moment it really hits this nice balance of playing like something between TOME4/DCSS with a pretty satisfying meta-progression system mostly built around slowly expanding the inventories of the various merchants that join your hub, and slowly expanding the starting options you have available to you (starting races which each have their own skill-trees much like TOME4, and starting equipment), plus occasionally adding items you find into your stash (though I've never felt a need to do this, I like starting runs with the bare minimum). it's really good, plays well on a controller too; if you like TOME4 or DCSS you should give this a shot.

The game is perfect for those that want a challenge and love finding fun or op builds. fire mage using a gun or do you prefer going for a build where your opponent damage themself when hitting you while you just take it like a champ. this game has it all be creative. Amazing game i recommand joining the discord as well since the dev is super friendly and interact with the community something rarely seen even for indie devs in my experience. he's also very receptive of new ideas as an exemple he added a blunderbuss and musket based on ideas i have him and i have seen others ideas come to live as well.

Great demo. Easy purchase after playing the demo. If you love Loots, Loots progression, chars progression, tons of skills, wacky mechanics, unique npcs, dungeon exploration, then this game is a absolute gem. There are so much fun to be had that I don't really know where to start.

Easily the best Mystery Dungeon game since Shiren. Ton of great classes and Races, and a whole bunch of skills to play with too. It gets much easier as you learn how to survive instead of trying to glass cannon everything. Highly recommended, bunch of fun already, and hey, there's a demo!

Feywood Wanderers is a tactical turn-based extraction roguelike set in a magical forest, and its loop is genuinely hard to put down. You're hunting a monstrous beast that's slowly destroying the world, but the forest itself will kill you long before you find it. The build variety is the heart of it. You pick a class and playstyle at the start. There's even a preset loadout option if you want to hit the ground running — but your build evolves naturally through the items you find and the wanderers you meet along the way. Nothing feels locked in, and no two runs play the same. One run you're a minotaur berserker smashing through enemies, the next you're a sneaky goblin picking them off from the shadows. What I also appreciate is how the game handles movement: every step is technically a turn. It adds a layer of tactical weight that you don't always notice at first, but it means positioning and decision-making matter even outside of combat. Nothing is throwaway. The extraction mechanic keeps things tense — die and you lose everything you were carrying. But you do gradually unlock things that carry forward, so each run feels like it means something. You start out weak and fragile, but the progression keeps you coming back to see just how deep you can push this time.

What is this game? It's basically a polished traditional roguelike with good interface, UI and visual presentation. Feywood Wanderers feels close to games like Tales of Maj Eyal or Dungeonmans, maybe Dungeons of Dredmor. It's definitely quite far in the direction of a Traditional Roguelike (thank god). Despite having extraction mechanics, I find it plays much closer to the above titles, compared to say, Quasimorph, where extracting materials is important. Also different to Quasimorph, each 'excursion' is much much longer. The extraction mechanics feel more like the stash mechanic added in Tales of Maj Eyal. This has a benefit of allowing you to squirrel away legendary items that fit builds you aren't currently trying. Although it can make builds a bit too easy to get online. Is it good? Overall, yes. There is definitely build variety. Varied biomes and enemies which require different strategies. The combat is not bump focussed which is definitely a big plus. I encountered very few bugs in my time with the game. All of which have now been fixed by the dev who is active both in the forums and with pushing updates. Slight negatives: Sometimes it can feel a little drawn out. After you clear a certain number of dungeons, you enter a 'challenge' system, this while interesting, feels like it lasts a bit too long. It can be easy to go on autopilot during this phase of the game and you just want to try yourself against the final boss. I do recommend this game. I was able to lose myself in it for a solid Sunday afternoon/evening and forget my responsibilities. It's been a long time since a game has done that for me.