By skyforbes It's been my travel companion on the steam deck while home for the holidays.
I'm very happy with it so far, having hit the "You're at the end of early access!" Splash screen after about 11 hours. But there's easily another 10 or 15 hours as I still have three (out of six that I know of) bosses to beat, another 60 relics to find and sell, and plenty of upgrades and store optimizations to buy.
Speaking of the store, I do like how they brought back the original pricing system instead of what they had in the demo. The perk system, special customers, furniture, and decorations all come together to form a cohesive store system. But I think it all really comes together in the dungeons where you're optimizing the relics you collect to sell. Trying to increase the quality of your relics as much as you possibly can.
Each out the three dungeons (with two variants) so far in early access come with distinct systems for their relics that you collect. And i do like how different each dungeon looks and plays.
The combat feels simple with its four weapons (spear sucks), but it's still plenty fun. One quest has you beat a dungeon with just the starting broom and it was tough, but i got a lot of good perks and managed it first try. I do hope they add more challenge dungeons where you have to navigate traps. There's three "hidden" rooms for quests, but I'd like to see each dungeon have trap rooms in the chain of rooms instead of a hidden one off.
Also, the boss fights! I've liked each one I've fought so far. Shout out to the guy riding a sky manta ray, that was awesome.
Story wise it's solid, it sets you up and let's you get to dungeon diving. It doesn't knock my socks off, but it doesn't need to. Characters are all fine too, no complaints. I actually really like the villain. While he is undoubtedly a bad guy, he doesn't come off as outwardly evil. Just obsessed. So far. I really should read more of the lore entries as I'm sure there's a lot of meat there, but when I'm dungeon diving the only thing on my mind is MONEY.
Performance on steam deck is mostly fine. It was much improved with a recent update, but still chugs sometimes when lots of fire slimes are on the screen or in the third sky dungeon. But nothing unplayable.
I look forward to this game growing to 1.0 and wish the devs the best of luck