 Give a man a card game and he'll log 30 hours into it without a second thought. Give a man a dice game and watch him go progressively wonky as he is forced to remember six different types of dice mechanics, one for each of the six characters you can unlock while playing Astria's six-sided oracle. That man is me. You know, in case it wasn't obvious, I've put 11 hours into Astria and could easily put another 11 after a few weeks. Having just unlocked the final of the six oracles though, I figure it's a great time to give your look under the hood. Oracles? Dice? A hood? What's this all about? I hear you ask. I'm glad you did because if you hadn't, no reason to make this video is there and that would mean I'm wasting my time again and that would send me into a hole filled with nothing, so much as existential dread and that's no bueno. So let's talk about what Astria's six-sided oracles does right. This game has a gorgeous and vibrant art style, one that works on the principles of contrast between red and blue. Your characters in their sentries are blue. Good effects are generally blue and the collar stands for purity. Corruption meanwhile is the violent force spreading throughout the world, twisting up cute animals and sentient creatures into horrible no good corrupt foes all in red. Their end, dual system of the game. Purity versus corruption. Nearly all dice have one or the other. You can use or discard or dice as per your preferences, except for the corruption ones, which you must use before you click that end turn button. You can use corruption on the enemies, thus increasing their over-corruption meters and getting them closer and closer to nasty effects that can empower them or hurt you. Or you can use corruption on yourself, thus decreasing your purity meter. Doing that latter option puts you at greater risk from enemy attacks, but it's not all bad because of the virtue system in place. Virtues are special abilities that play to your character's strengths. Nearly all characters have some mechanic for rerolling dice in your hand. All of them have different methods of spreading purification around. That might be an area of effect purification blast like the one Celerius has, or a single target one, or a variety of others. You can use one virtue every turn on full purification. The other is you unlock as you get more and more corrupted. It's a cool mechanic made cooler by the fact that if you can keep dropping your purification bar all the way down and up, down and up, down and up, you can reuse the Virtues time and again. There are also some dice that refresh these virtues without having to take any damage, but if I get into every different type of die I've unlocked, we will be here by this time tomorrow, and the existential red hole will start getting upset. And we don't want that. Oh no sir. No we don't. The soundtrack, so short, is catchy. Dangerously close to an earworm at times, is the work of Moon Celer, a video game music collective formed in 2020, having worked on plenty of games you might never have heard about. I hadn't, but now that I have, I might give them a try. The music is catchy enough, all 28 minutes and 53 seconds of its OST. Of course it all loops seamlessly. Hazard for endless musical magic. Astria is a game in the same vein as Slay the Spire, with dice and Amor, a beat-hopeful world, one that's not afraid of a little bit of levity from the sounds of the company dialogue boxes to the vibrancy of the world. I hesitate to call it a spiritual successor, but certainly there is a familial relationship between the two games, with Astria following the formula of the card roguelike in so many ways, from the way that each node on the map functions to the progression after each run. Your character gathers experience based on whatever you've accomplished over the run, no matter whether successful or not. At the end of each stage is a boss, with several possible bosses across each level, with more mechanically challenging enemies appearing the further you get into the game. Astria is more forgiving and easier than Slay the Spire as well. I unlocked every character within 10 hours of play and beat the game with a character over a single run several times, with several different characters. Although I haven't yet faced the game's true end game boss as I stopped just after my first playthrough with the last Oracle, who by the way was a bit of a pain to unlock. You have to defeat the last level's boss with all five characters and there was one character I had a time and a half with. For the most part, I felt empowered to take risks without fearing that a single big one would cost me an entire run. Now, I haven't played Slay the Spire properly for a few years, but I recall it being a less forgiving game than this one. Slay's elite monsters were a lot more engaging than Astria's. Especially the last level's elites in Astria are rarely more than a nuisance. There's one particular elite as Shark that expires on its own after four turns. Before those turns are up, the shark is invulnerable. The shark does a massive amount of damage until you start hacking away with it with purification damage, at which point the battle becomes a time hurdle. Those engagements are the dullest I've had across this game and just about every deckbuilder. I've played a lot of deckbuilders, the dread hole likes them. Anyway, in a game chock full of fun synergies, that encounter sticks out like a sore thumb. The game's biggest strength is its complexity. In a way, that's also its biggest weakness. Across the six playable characters, you get six sets of unique mechanics, each coming with multiple builds, each so chock full of different die symbols you might as well tattoo them on your flesh and replay the first three seasons of Blindspot in order to figure them all out. I think. I never actually saw Blindspot, but go Jamie Alexander and Ashley Johnson! Characters have a team, a purpose and I'll dig into that purpose in a little bit, but not before I say a little more on complexity first. The sheer combination of synergy possible between different dies, items and virtues is staggering. Every decision has strategic weight. And every decision can optimize your deckbuilder. That's not only true for the dies you pick, but also for those occasions on which you skip a die or item. I've never skipped anything in my life, so I wouldn't know, but doing so can really help you crystallize the purpose of your dice deck? Dice...back? Alternately, finding a cool item early on can define your play style throughout the run, or at the very least direct it. You can start a new run with the option of picking either a minor or a major item once you level your characters enough. So it's a little like a role of the must-a-word I'm looking for. Ah yeah, barrel of a gun. The dread hole loves Russian roulette too. What did you think I was going with that joke, really? On to characters. Mooney. Do you like your ice cream vanilla and your fornication the ways that nuns and priests do it? If that's the case, you will love Mooney and Mooney will love you. This cute little owl is as easy as undemanding as they come. I don't know what her deal is. Maybe she's purity crusader, maybe she has a chastity belt, but there's nothing here that will defend your fundamentalist Christian in-laws. Mooney is your tutorial character, there to teach you about the basics of the game. If you play her after you've unlocked other characters, what's wrong with you? Celerius, this bad boy loves pain as much as a living masochist that your local German dungeon does. To do massive amounts of damage, Celerius will take massive amounts of damage. But through the healing power of wave dyes, light shields and other methods of self-healing, he can take care of himself. More or less, I had a hard time wrapping up a successful run with Celerius, which means I spent more time with him than I did with anyone else. Despite me initial difficulty mastering his playstyle, I find now that in success, I finally found a way to enjoy this truest glutton for punishment. Am I playing with him again? No. Will I miss him? Also no. But did we bond on some deep, inexplicable level that will haunt me for the rest of my life? No, that's not it either. I give up. Celerius. Who? Haha, just joking. I definitely remember Celerius and definitely don't have to go look back in my footage to remember what playing with him was like. Shockingly, my memory of him returned just after I wrote that last sentence, but I'm pathologically incapable of dropping a bit. It occurs and occurs. Celerius looks stunky and his dyes tend to come with serious amounts of light shields, which protects from corruption. He's also the character who does really interesting things with sentries, while all characters have axes to them. Celerius' dyes buff and make these companions really bloody strong. To have a good time with Heveius, you need to learn to exploit sentries to maximise the synergy between character and sentries. Sotis. Oh, Sotis, my friend. I wish I could play with you some more. I don't even have an inappropriate joke to slide in here. All I want to do is slide back into playing with this guy. Wait, does that count? Sotis stacks soul heat. That's how hot he is, which empowers his dice rolls and even gives him axes to amazingly powerful dice abilities. My personal favourite is Sunray, which requires the maximum amount of soul heat you can master. Ten. You get a single stack of soul heat every time you use purification or corruption. Some of his dyes include abilities that do an x amount of purification over several hits, which really helps stack that soul heat. Some dyes can have negative effects without soul heat, but positive and even super positive effects the more soul heat you've collected. The fact that Sotis looks like he stepped out of an Egyptian fresco doesn't hurt his coolness factor either. He's mega fun. Ten out of ten. Austria. Austria is shockingly not the protagonist of this game, but don't be bummed out. She's a lot of chaos and fun and looks like a hornet. Random dyes that can do either purification or damage are her lot in life. To survive those, she's got an array of dodge rolls to make. Her abilities also include buffs to damage, something like hornet dust, which increases purification the enemy receives from you by x until you deal purification to an enemy. She's a fun oracle. We like Austria. Orion. This guy. Oh boy. Is this guy complex? He looks like he's been drinking that Kelta Sunstrider Kool-Aid with four orbs floating around him, each one having a different effect. I'll be honest with you. The sheer number of abilities and effects you have to memorize are a little daunting. And why I decided to take a step back and work on this review now, rather than keep at it. I'm sure I'll return to Orion and try and dig the true boss a proper grave with him. But I was not in the right headspace for this level of complexity when I finally unlocked the old boy. That's it then. A quick rundown of what you can expect from these weird little critters and from Astria's excited oracle. My verdict. This game is an excellent dice deck builder and a must play for anyone who enjoys games of the variety that Slay the Spare is. If you don't, what the hell are you doing here? Thank you for watching. I appreciate you. I still prefer to read or play Kiran Gillen's Die over playing this though. And that comic book has way more dice induced murders than Astria does. Astria is great for her pacifism by the way. Almost no one ever ever dies. It's just that you purify them. So a great lesson in nonviolent conflict resolution. Oh, there's also a narrative framework. I dare not call it a story because if I did I'd have to take it seriously and I'd rather not tell you that Astria's story is biff shit now, won't I? I've said, broth. If you enjoyed this video, thank you for watching. So, so much. This video couldn't be possible without contributors on my pa- wait, I don't have a Patreon? Shit. Ah well. If you enjoyed this video, please share it with your friends. Send it to them as well. Uh, what? I already told you. Anyway, press the like button. Smash the like button. Leave a comment down below. What game should I look to next? Yeah, that's a question. What game should I review next? That's probably a better question. Yeah. Thanks for watching seriously. I really appreciate it. And you. I'll see you next time. Bye!