Soulash

I would say nay, mainly due to the pretty poor crafting and control mechanisms. played the game more than steam lets on if you go for any spellcasting type of build, you will hate yourself because you will need to constantly press the button of the spell (even firebolt or acid blast, which can be cast every turn) and then click on the enemy, rather than being able to set any of them as a default attack option Items degrade very quickly, and you ironically enough are encouraged to not use them but rather keep them for when you need a specific stat boost - like a shield giving 3 intelligence being dropped randomly when you are playing as the djin, which you would much prefer to wear in your non combat time for the extra weight carry capacity (djin special) you are also severely encouraged to go for max endurance in the early levels because it defines how much HP you gain on level up - meaning that early on endurance will translate into power later, rather than allowing me to go all out on damage the crafting, meanwhile, makes one recipe per item - meaning brass greavers and iron greavers are different recipes, and if you want to use iron, steel, silver or gold you will need to find an item that needs them and salvage it in the hopes of learning the recipe (boosted by intelligence and you gain an aditional 5% chance per salvaged item, but it takes a lot of time and is still RNG dependant) and otherwise, the material is worthless aggroing an enemy that is faster than you, be it a bat during the early levels, or even a bee, is a death sentence - they will pursue you till you or they are dead, so you cannot truly run away from them enemies, no matter what they call out, behave the same way, only ever attacking you - so a miner begging for mercy or food is going to agressively pursue and attack you corspes are ignored by the enemy, and the only thing they do is wander around and heal HP over time, so an archer that used all his arrows is now going to go into melee, and things like farms or animals are just for visuals or to give you a form of nourishment if you die, that is a restart - this means that if you accidentally run into a tough enemy or more enemies come in or you have bad luck at something, you will lose all the grinding you did via crafting a bunch of wheat into food or summoning lots of skeletons (needs a corspe, bones count as corpses) or via the slow grind of pressing 1 to select firebolt, select an enemy to cast it on, watch the unskippable animation and repeat necromancer summoning skeletons does not care about what corpse it is used on, it will always be a simple and weak skeleton. it works best with gnoll if I remember the species correctly, because they scavange more from butchering corpses - meaning you can get multiple bones from a human corpse, to turn into skeletons. which means you need to do a lot of micro simply to play effectively, as you need to go to the corpse, press b to butcher, butcher it. repeatedyl rest as your stamina runs out, then put the bones on the floor, then press the spell button to make it into a skeleton. and you HAVE to do this because a bear summons the same skellie as this pile of 1/3rd of a human all around, the balance is just massively off, the QOL is missing, and while the dev has adressed some issues in the next game (crafting using item components based on type from what I understood) the controls and UI seem to be just as if not worse in the new game - you can test it out yourself in the free demo. I revisited this game because I found the concept interesting, but unfortunately it is not really "done" - it is finished for those who like playing barbarians or fighters and thsoe who do not mind jank or time intensive steps to progress. but I am not one of them, and I assume you too want to at least be given the option to play warlock normally, rather than be forced to contend with only half the product being viable, and having that too be halved again due to the way the game works. I just hope that the next game becomes better as it develops EDIT: Oh yeah, and forgot to say, things like fireball (lower level than dragons breath, despite higher AOE and being usable at range) are rather useless because you cannot shoot it behind enemies if one is in front of you, so you will be hit by it too if you use it - and you will only ever engage one enemy at a time, unless you are clearing something you are way overleveled for, because you only really will ever have the strength to take on one enemy at a time. even taking only 1 damage due to high endurance (reduces damage by 1 every 2 levels) I need to not engage what I actually want or should be able to fight, because needing 20 hits to kill an enemy means I would take 20 damage if i engaged them one on one, 60 damage if it was 2v1, or 120 damage if it was 3v1, so you just fight, rest, fight, rest and repeat, repeat, repeat

I bought the bundle just to leave positive reviews and support the dev. Get rekt, wokie fascists!

I absolutely loved playing this game. The early progression is very well-paced. It's a unique experience I've yet to see replicated, and the power increases you get from your first couple of levels feel extremely significant. The only problem I have with Soulash is that, in the later stages of the game, every enemy has hundreds of health, while your attacks cap out at dealing at most around 40 damage (with the exception of vengeance). Going through the capital city starts to feel tedious when it takes several turns to kill basic soldiers, of which you'll be fighting at least 3 in the smallest encounters. On the other hand, the turn-based combat really starts to shine when you get to fight unique enemies like the gods, or the Emperor/Sandaver. Soulash could definitely benefit from a little rebalancing there. The first time I beat the game was as a poacher, but every class uniquely viable (necromancer moreso than the others, haha). Seemingly menial abilities like Quickstep, decreasing movement intervals, can completely change the way you approach encounters. Handling the minutiae like your hunger and thirst bars, carrying capacity, elemental resistances and damage, vision, etc. adds a great deal of complexity to the game, and it's a joy to have it all come together. The only exception to this is durability, which I hate with a passion. Regardless, I highly recommend this game. The learning curve is very steep, but the gameplay is extremely rewarding.

Best ♥♥♥♥ ever. Surprisingly tactical as well, Has a ton of systems that I didn't use, but I appreciate their existence. Attention to detail is visible everywhere. I played it with zeal and obsession over how fun it is. Really wish there was a steam achievement for killing all the gods tho.

dont buy this game, its a waste of money

ehh not really that good wouldn't recommend it

Great game is basically a power fantasy that builds on itself, but be ready for the scaling to hit you like a truck because it does. Enemies that are named are much more difficult to kill but have the best loot usually, and they also can have special abilities like the pc has. If you want to have the most fun pick warlock or necromancer, though necromancer does have a very hard first level but acid spit is so good it is unreal. Another thing is that durability is used when using abilities with all classes so heads up on that. tl:dr - is a really fun power fantasy especially playing warlock or necromacer

I enjoyed it for the first few hours but by hour 10 i was lacking any motivation to keep grinding. Too repetitive and too 'simple' for my tastes. My fault for not watching some game play videos first. I don't recommend Soulash, but maybe you'll enjoy i, watch some gameplay videos to decide.

This game is fantastic. Once you get the hang of how to play, you get better. This is everything you'd want in a rogue-like. It's fun, non-forgiving, and has great music. The developer seems to put his heart and soul into this, and it shows. You can lose yourself for a couple of hours of just goofing around. I also bought the sequel, which is a bigger, better version of this, allowing you to get married, have a family, and descendants to play on after you die. 8/10, and well worth the purchase.

I really like the premise of Soulash and overall it’s a ok-ish game, but it really suffers from a lack of QoL features and has a bunch of systems and weird design decisions that might sound nice on paper, but detract from the experience in practice. Just a few examples: -> I don’t like the vision system. You’re not able to look behind you depending on which direction your character is facing and there’s also a lighting system that practically renders you blind without a light source or infravision. Sure, there are ways to deal with it, but it gets annoying having to cast a spell every ~50 turns or constantly swapping equipment. -> Since I mentioned the character facing a direction: The movement system takes some time to get used to. I really don’t understand why the dev didn’t just go with the classic approach, especially since the current implementation doesn’t really add anything from a game design perspective. At first I thought maybe you take more damage when attacked from the side, or you auto-crit enemies when hitting them from behind or stuff like that, but as far as I can tell that’s not the case. -> Somehow the game just feels slow. At first I thought it was because of the animations, but even on 4x speed it still felt that way. With multiple enemies around, you sometimes have to wait ~1 second until it’s your turn again and traveling longer distances also really drags on, because even in the middle of the wilderness with no enemies around there’s still a small delay between turns. Maybe it’s my PC, though. -> This game needs auto-explore or at least something like "go to stairs" It’s tedious to manually walk back and forth after clearing a dungeon, especially since stairs are not even properly marked on the map. -> Afaik the map also has no zoom function, so it’s only useful for very rough orientation. -> I also didn’t like the stamina/fatigue system, Every action costs stamina so you constantly have to rest. Resting builds fatigue which is removed by sleeping. Constantly having to rest/sleep is pretty annoying, especially early on. You tend to get interruped by enemies all the time, too. -> There’s basically no healing in this game except resting and the occasional spell, which not all classes have access to. Potions or similar doesn't exist. So you spend a good chunk of your time resting till healed. -> Thirst and hunger.. again, sounds good on paper, but just like stamina/resting it ends up being an annoying mechanic that pulls me away from actually playing the game. If it were more integrated into gameplay and eating good food gave you buffs or smth, that would be a different story. But as it is, it adds very little value, IMO. -> Equipment degradation.. again, annoying. I don’t think this really adds anything to the experience either, at least not the way it’s handled here. You can repair equipment a limited number of times, but only at a workbench, anvil etc. This forces you to regularly break your flow just to look for or travel to one of these things. After a while I didn’t bother anymore and just swapped broken gear for new loot and trashed the old stuff, which unfortunately makes equipment boring, because there’s no real investment in it. You know that every fancy item you get will crumble after a couple hundred turns anyway (even with repair, because it just delays the inevitable). At some point I didn’t even really look at the stats anymore. -> Crafting.. and again.. annoying. At least it’s not required (I think), so I mostly ignored it. Annoying because harvesting materials as well as the actual crafting costs time and stamina (and you again need workbenches, anvils etc.) So you decide to make some iron bars for crafting a bunch of swords, in the hope one of them has good stats for you. You mine iron ore, get fatigued, have to rest/sleep, which increases hunger/thirst, so you have to look for food in between. Then the ore is heavy and you can’t even carry all of it, but you need a smelter to make bars. You find a smelter, smelting costs stamina again, so you have to take breaks and also keep an eye on hunger/thirst ticking down. Then you have your barsT and you craft the actual swords, which again costs stamina and time.. more resting/sleeping, eating, drinking.. Tbh, it was all way too tedious for me and not worth the effort. -> In the beginning lot's of enemies can outrun you, which quickly becomes a death sentence. Balacing as a whole is kinda wacky. Spell damage scales off of equipped weapons for example (probably to justify crafting grind) and spells and abilities are very same-y and boring, partly because of this. -> Other small things, like not being able to sort your inventory, constantly having to switch between mouse and keyboard for targeting most skills, weird default keybindings, not being able to simply drag skills around in the hotbar etc. I admit that some of this is probably personal taste. That said the game is not terrible, but is definitely not for everyone. I did one succsessful playthrough while using Cheat Engine to get rid of some of the annoyance and it was ok, but would I recommend it? No, not really. I hope the dev takes this feedback to heart for Soulash 2, the sequel.