Thea: The Awakening

When I started playing Thea: The Awakening, I was excited for its possibilities. I'd love to play the game that I thought, in those early hours, that I was playing. If the card battle system were better and less predictable, if there was more stuff to do with your village and a greater tension between exploration and protecting your home, if failure weren't quite so punishing or random at times… Thea breaks the mold by doing a lot of different things at once. It just needs to do all of them better.

Thea: The Awakening wants to be many things. It wants to be a proper 4X game; it wants to be a through-and-through survival experience; it wants to be an RPG, a CCG and many other genres all at once. It succeeds at some, but often at the expense of others. There are some really great ideas here – the almost Pratchett-esque silliness to some of its scenarios and the focus on Slavic myths serves as a striking source of inspiration – but the focus on micro-management busywork simply gets in the way of the empire-building fun Thea should really be embracing.

An incredibly addictive gameplay experience that ropes you in, dazzling you with its unique world and storytelling, that you will quickly lose sleep over.

With so many interlocking systems, Thea: The Awakening is a bit of a Frankenstein of a game, but kudos to MuHa for bolting together everything so seamlessly and for trying something new, though it might be time for developers to put card game subsystems on ice for a few years.

Thea: The Awakening for the Nintendo Switch puts the focus on Slavic myths, rather the by now extremely common settings of Norse mythology or medieval backgrounds. That alone deserves praise, as it brings some much-needed variety to the catalogue. However, Thea starts turning into a disappointing effort when it starts trying to be everything at the same time and with so many things going in every direction, the game loses focus and becomes a cumbersome experience for the player, even if there are still elements worthy of praise.

Never mind the fact that Thea: The Awakening can frequently feel like a needlessly complicated 4X stategy/survival rogue-like/card battler. If that was its only issue, this would be an easy recommendation. Regrettably, the inconvenience that is its user interface mars what could be something really awesome.

For fans of simulation titles with a sweet mix of RPG elements, Thea is an easy recommendation as there is very little on the Switch that even compares in the genre.

There’s a lot to the adventuring component, and the challenges are fun. Don’t expect much hand-holding, but expect the challenge to be enjoyable and tense.

There's a lot of good in Thea: The Awakening. Nearly every bit of text is voiced, it's cool being able to grow your group of people, handling combat head-on or simply selecting to auto-resolve is implemented well, and there's a great deal of customization.

Thea: The Awakening is good. Very, very good, and where something like Civilization is hard to play in short bursts, Thea is an ideal title for train trips and the like. I have no idea how the team has handled the sequel (currently in Early Access on Steam), but with this first one, there is a superb foundation here for what could become one truly special franchise.