Beneath Oresa evolves and beautifies the Slay the Spire experience

1 year 6 months ago

Slay the Spire looms large over the Roguelike deckbuilding genre. Arguably, it created it, so it's hard to find a game here that doesn't copy it. Beneath Oresa copies it. You can feel it in the way you fight, the way you build your deck, the way you progress. Take all the Slay the Spire parts away and you don't really have a game. But that's OK, I think, because we've come to a point where Slay the Spire serves as a foundation for games to build on. And I find that exciting. And Beneath Oresa is why.

The first thing is that Beneath Oresa is big, in terms of file size. It's 4GB, a relative whopper. And I know you probably have flash-drives bigger than that - you probably had flash-drives bigger than that 10 years ago - but in the world of deckbuilding Roguelikes, that's big, like, dinosaur big. They're usually measured in megabytes.

What this means is that Beneath Oresa has graphics (no offence, Slay the Spire). It has proper 3D characters and environments, and swishy animations, and a cinematic eye (and camera) for using them. There's a moment of slow-down after you charge up to enemies and whack them, for example, as if the game's going, "Go on, do it again," so it can string together a fancy fight scene. And if you heed the call, the game can feel genuinely action-packed, which is an odd feeling for something like this, but I like it.

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Author
Robert Purchese

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