Arboria

this has been a neat game for me since i saw.... sunlightbro doing the souls like games series. i love how weird and interestiing this game is. it has a lot of weapons and abilities as well as not only starting perks but the amount of perks you can add and build on as you progress. there may not be a huge enemy variety, the first area of the game, with bugz, has the most effort put into it as all the bugs look different based on whatever element they are in that run. while other areas remain mostly static in apearence. this game runs on a pokeemon like element system where an element an enemy is weak to will take exta damage as well as have the blight build up on them faster, while weak elements don't do as much damage and build up slower. the areas themselves are interesting and each area being somewhat drastically different in their designs. while everything takes place underground, you do get more than just a cave, even if it can kind of end up being nothing but caves with some different furniture in it. the only downside to this is, some portions of the randomly generated rooms can clip or cause issues where you can get stuck, unable to get around things, or creatively mash dodge until you clip through that tiny barrier keeping you out of a doorway. this game has a very minor story, but it was fun to listen to it. the opening cutscene and tutorial give you the basis of why you are going underground, as well as somee audio logs to give an idea of what is going on, or why things are the way they are. there is a pseudo base building feature in this game as well. it isn't so much as you building things, but as you progress and heal the roots of the tree you gain access to more merchants, that you can upgrade with the money you earn as your progress into the dungeons, giving you access to stronger items to start, better stats, or new items like healing or special abilities to make next runs easier. as for the difficulty, i never thought of myself as the most souls professional, so i thought this was a pretty decent difficulty to me. if you are careless you can lose your run, but also just bad luck on skills, or weapons and items you chose along the way. some of the ways the game keeps it interesting is that when you die any money you collect is brought up for you to spend, the only catch is that your god demands tribute. it usually goes by the god demands a set amount, and the more you pay the better your troll's stats will be, but the next time you return they will want more, making a run either neutral or harder, especially if you have a bad run and can't pay the gods. you would think that this would make some runs really bad, but some of the better runs i have had somehow ended up being when the gods punished me, while the runs i paid tribute to would fail within the first couple floors. which brings one last difficulty, new games. if you want to see then entire story/true ending you need to beat the game multiple times, which doesn't sound that bad. there is new game, where you play the game as it was designed and have fun beinig the default. then there is new game+ which as you think, allows you to keep all of your unlocks and anything you worked up towards. enemies are harder and there are champions, basically enemies with modifiers on them something to add a little more difficulty in groups. the final thing of ng+ is being able to further upgrade your village to become as powerful as you want. there is also the fun father tree element, which allow you to add modifiers to make the game harder, in return giving you more money at the end of a run, in the form of a percentage multiplier. which is cool, and doesn't seem that big a deal at first, but the more you use the tree's curses the faster it levels up, which in turn allows you to rake in so much money that you can unlock everything you wanted, max it all out, and still have infinite money left over. then there is the DIABOLICAL NG+2. i only call it that, liek i said, i am not the best, but i can be decent. the real chllenge here is that you lose all progress you made and need to rebuild everything to give yourself the best chance to beat the game this time around, BUT you only have 10 lives to do it, otherwise all that progress gets wiped and you need to do it all over again. i was so stressed out over this because i am absolutely certain there are some extra modifiers like enemies having more health and dealing more damage which made the first few lives feel like i was not going to have hope, but as i pushed on and got further down i managed to get lots of money to be able to boost up my other trolls to impressive amounts. it might be a little slow, a little clunky, and a little janky, but if this game has looked interesting to you, and you like dungeon crawling roguelikes. this one might be worth picking up and checking out.