Yaengard

Wait for a deep sale. What's here is worth roughly $10, and further development seems minor to unlikely based on their news and Discord posting. But as someone who's already consumed a lot of their competition, I decided to take a chance on it. Meh review, but leaning towards negative due to lack of polish. There are bugs. Rewards are sometimes not given (typically Treasure/Potion related ones in my experience), a certain boss near the end of the game needs a minute or more to resolve its turns (likely some logic bug such as an internal infinite loop), settings often aren't saved or applied on change, etc. Nonetheless, annoying as they were, I was able to do a complete run. Meta seems to be less about forcing archetypes and more about finding a mix of weapons that don't care about their own weapon damage (supportive effects generally) and swapping the rest out to keep up with loot power creep. Yet, there's little reason to seek out combat when the alternative is free loot and/or personality traits, so having an AGI specialist to flee mandatory combat nodes means you can mostly be looting. Events are very repetitive, you'll have several that you see 5+ times each in a given run. The variation is in what 3 cards you'll be given to respond with, but that's not enough. "Act III" isn't really an act. Think of it more as an extended end to Act II. Line of sight is inconsistent. Some objects that don't show as a wall prevent ranged attacks, and other locations that look walled off aren't. There's a few specific maps with these issues. Trinkets are supposed to be game-changing equipment with a strong positive and strong negative effect, but not once in my first full run did I see a good reason to take one. The negative effects are consistently bad, but the positive effects tend to be niche enough that you'd have to be in an ideal spot for it to be good - and then you're stuck with it until the next trinket even as your gear changes and said effects are no longer good. Potions barely exist (Act II) and feel tacked on. Most of the loot you'll be taking are three generic armor pieces (+stats, no unique effects) and two weapons (1-3 skills and a Weapon Damage range). Overall? A passable timesink loot/dungeon crawler that's suitable for multitasking, since the complexity is on the lighter side. There's enough difficulty modifiers to challenge most players, but no metaprogression so the use of said modifiers is up to the player.