One Step From Eden

One Step From Eden (OSEF) is a pretty interesting game. It's very clearly based on the megaman battle network series, yet it's so different from it's inspiration that saying that almost feels like underselling it. So, what is it? It's a rougelike about characters attempting to get to a place called "Eden", hence the name. There's vague lore you can put together from character dialogue and descriptions, but outside of that the story isn't really the main focus. Plus, there's 3 wildly different endings so the game's tone can be... strange. The gameplay follows a pretty simple loop; you move through areas, getting into battles while drafting new spells for your "deck". This is a deckbuilder, though calling it that feels weird at times since it's anything but a slow-paced strategy game. But there is deckbuilding elements, so I can't argue with that. Pathing is pretty simple (there's only 3 paths you can take, and it's generally just deciding between different types of battles, and then occasionally between resting, a shop, or a chest.) What makes this game work is ultimately the battle system. It's megaman battle network on every single drug known to man. Combat is fast. Really fast. Spells do a lot of damage and fast, but need to be aimed well (most of the time) to do anything. Enemies have simple attack patterns, but they again attack fast and many of them can tear down your health at incredibly fast speeds on higher difficulties. The spells you use to fight are designed such that they work best together. Each one has a "Brand" with a cute name (Slashfik, Anima, Hexawan, etc) that puts it in a general category. Most spells tend to synergize with other members of their brands at first. Because yeah, having more poison cards from the poison category tends to work well. But what you start to realize is that many of the spells more generic effects also synergize well with other brands. Turns out, Rooting enemies in place works really well with spells that set the ground on fire, even if the aren't in the same category. The game's passive artifacts further encourage this, as most of them add synergies between categories. Now your fire suddenly applies poison to targets, and your poison can now apply frost stacks, which themselves can now slow and root a target. It's a very interesting contrast; the deck-building is very slow and methodical. It's more like labbing out possible combos in a fighting game. You're even given free reign to throw around your spells between fights to see what the ideal method of working through your deck is. Notably, you can only really have 1 copy of a given spell in a deck at a time, and there's no real way to guarantee you draw any given card first. Which means when you get into a fast-paced fight, you have to suddenly translate that abstract strategy into something workable on the fly. Sure, some decks can get away with spamming their spells, but a lot of decks will need to be thinking several enemy moves ahead, by striking where they're *going* to be in a second rather than where they are currently. It's just a very unique style of game, and when you get the flow of combat down, you feel like an honest to god anime protagonist, throwing out spells and techniques that utterly devastate your opponents in seconds. That is not a feeling that a lot of games can give you outside of maybe like, fighting games. With that said, the game isn't perfect. A lot of it's more obscure mechanics are just not really spelled out to the player, and feel like things that were added in during an EA period which were never properly explained to someone who didn't play it then. Removals can actually be used not just on cards, but also artifacts and even the debuffing "Pacts" you can take at shops for extra rewards. There's three endings based on how many bosses you choose to murder, and it really isn't clear that you can just... leave after a boss is defeated to spare them. Most egregiously, you can actually manually select up to two brands (or the same brand twice) to show up more often in rewards to fish for certain cards. This is incredibly helpful, and I had no idea the mechanic existed until after I had beat the game on it's highest difficulty, Hell Mode 14. Speaking of those Hell Modes, the game has an ascension system with 14 "Hell Passes", modifiers you can enable which make the game progressively harder. These are... hit and miss for me, personally. Stuff like removing the 4 tile aim indictor (many spells hit exactly 4 tiles away) feels less like making the game actually harder and more like making it more incomprehensible. Hell Mode 14 outright starts you at 1 Max HP, turning the game into a "don't get hit at all" simulator which is interesting, but is just such a leap in difficulty and feels counter to the design of so many enemies that it feels like an afterthought. There's also just the issue that the game is really, really, REALLY fast. I have less trouble keeping up with late-game Ultrakill gameplay than I do the higher hell modes of OSFE. It gets to the point by the end of runs that it feels easier to just have a deck which kills things so fast that they never get a chance to do their interesting attack patterns, rather than actually dealing with and learning those attack patterns. Especially with how crazy the bosses scale by the end of the game if you have them start out at their "max" potential. But hey, that's just how the game is played. I can always drop the difficulty down if I want to. And I do; Hell Mode 14 was a fun one-time challenge, but it's not for me. That's alright. At the end of the day, this is a wonderful game which feels very good to play and looks amazing (the pixel art is incredibly smooth and really adds to the sense of power and slickness of each character). Give it a shot, just be prepared for something very fast paced and you'll have a great time.