The core gameplay - the dungeon crawl turn based squad tactical battle - is extremely solid. The family management/social aspect advertised is....not. I bought the game thinking I would be wheeling and dealing and marrying via a large roster of noble houses. Instead you get randomly generated characters, and then when you "have a kid" you get another randomly generated character that has some of the stats and skills of both "parents". I put these in parenthesis because instead of simulating years, the game takes place over the course of weeks, and your "children" are artifically grown into fighting adults instantly. There's some great art and customizable portraits, but they lack personality. It doesn't help that you can easily gain 3-5 levels per character per dungeon, meaning it is not hard picking up all the good perks from all the good classes on all the characters you want, creating a lot of powerful but samesy feeling squadmates (the game operates on a FF Tactics style class system where you assign a class and gain class specific abilities, passives, and stat bundles, and can switch between classes mixing and matching, not that this is especially well explained). Your roster ends up feeling pretty bloated by the time you enter act 3 (there is an option to "retire" heroes for gold, but there has so far not been a single instance where that makes sense-- even from a scaling perspective, my earliest heroes are still on fairly equal footing to my "descendants"). It also appears that you gain the same amount of XP per battle regardless of your character level or if it is a boss fight or a standard one? So I guess the idea if you want to maximize your efficacy is to run the same guys over and over while you spend your excess money training in the background.
Speaking of money, there's nothing to do with this stuff. Your character is "in debt" which means any money you do not spend before launching a dungeon is lost. But the only thing to spend it on is healing, stamina healing, and xp gain. The enemies seem extremely underpowered (enemy variety is a little lacking too), I'm regularly running characters 5-6 levels below the recommended dungeon level with no real difficulty, so there's not that much I need to spend on healing. The hardest part of this game so far was getting a random event as my very first act in the game that gave me passive life steal at the cost of 20% of my max health in damage at the start of every round. Without that, I've basically never seen a character drop below 50% so far.
The main roster of NPCs you will be interacting with are a cast of six from three noble houses of the city. Character writing varies wildly between all of them and this is your main social interaction mechanics. You raise your influence by completing either mission requests for them, or specific rooms within dungeons that have themed objectives around them (for example, later on your assistant will launch a mission type where you have to "rescue" cardboard cutouts of civilians before they "die", for example, instead of just clearing the room. This is also a mission I have issues with because the game does not tell you how many civilians need to be rescued, nor how many you can lose before the fail state triggers).
There's also a lot of weird little QoL stuff that's missing- the reroll dice button is extremely finnicky and often when I click it, it deselects my dice instead of working. In most situations, you cannot hit escape to open the menu. When you bring more than 3 characters into a dungeon, the select screen isn't big enough and cuts off the XP bar of the furthest left character. I've tried to move a character to a spot only to have them get stuck against a wall for 30 seconds before rerouting. The Commander character's special one time bugged out and would not let me select the spot I wanted to cast it to.
Despite all of this, I am having fun. The soundtrack is nice, the aesthetic is something I vibe with, you feel very powerful during combat. At the same time, I don't think I will revisit this game after I finish this run.
