Astral Ascent

I wish I could live like Kiran

As a roguelike/lite, I'd say the greatest strength of Astral Ascent that there is a consistent flow of meaningful decisions throughout any run. Right up to the end stretch, there can be meaningful decisions about how you shape your build. In other games of the genre, I tend to feel pretty locked into whatever I'm doing relatively early on since there's a lot of uncertainty and risk to trying to pivot. Though, a lot of the mechanics that help with pivoting (rerolls and such) aren't immediately available, which leads to... Talking about meta-progression: Astral Ascent is very heavy on it. Every run (especially victories) will come with a bunch of new things to unlock both in side grades (such as new spells and auras) and in permanent upgrades (such as unlocking extra aura slots, upgrading your base health, and having more rerolls). Though, this doesn't come with the common caveat that you start out too weak to win at the start. Enemies also start relatively weak at first, and as you win, the difficulty goes up as you challenge the "Path of Destiny." If you like the idea of a constant flow of rewards as you play run to run, then this a great game for that. As for the actual gameplay, I like the overall feel. I enjoy how hitting enemies instantly refreshes the dash/dodge, so there can be a good flow from your aggression enabling evasion. Spells feel punchy and impactful. Everything also explodes when synergies really get going. I do have some gripes with how attacks are telegraphed though. For a one example, there is how the same red "threat zones" are used for both beams and lightning bolts that hit the screen instantly and big projectiles that can take a half-second to actually get to it. These little inconsistencies aren't a big deal early when you can take plenty of hits, but as you go along the Path of Destiny, things can get very chaotic and taking punishing hits that don't feel like they were communicated well is frustrating. One thing I want to point out that feels especially unfair is the "Thorny Foes" modifier for the Path of Destinies combined with a boss/enemy that teleports, such as the Sculptor miniboss. The teleport doesn't have a telegraph: the teleport itself is supposed to be the telegraph for the regular attack that comes after. But the Thorns effect can be triggered from a safe distance, and the teleport can happen just before it pops so that I get hit without having a chance to do anything. As for the story, it is quite bland in my opinion. There is a big, bad evil guy and the playable characters want to stop him from conquering the galaxy. The characters do have some established relationships here and there which are explored in bits and pieces of dialogue and in "Memory Fragments" that share bits of character backstory. There is enough that could serve as a writing prompt if you were inclined to write fanfiction to fill in gaps yourself, but what's here isn't especially appealing on its own. Regarding the DLC, having Yamat and Arven available has helped to keep things engaging for me. I'm a "random select" kind of person and I'd probably be having less fun without them in the roster. I like the Andromeda duel as an extra boss fight to practice consistently with a valuable reward. I haven't had too much benefit from the alternate areas though. I did put time into it by playing a separate file where I exclusively used the DLC areas to practice them, but they still feel harder overall than the base game areas, and more challenge hasn't been what I'm looking for when there's still more of the Path of Destinies to overcome. Though, I'm not sure how much further I'd actually care to progress through it: the layers of modifiers that punish taking damage basically push you to at least get very long perfect streaks (if not perfect runs), and I don't know if I'm up for grinding through that kind of thing much more. Still, I've enjoyed my time with this game as it is whether I push for total completion or not.