You've crash landed on an alien planet, made of hexagons (the bestagons). There's a big monster living under the earth, all labias and tentacles (really). And you need to save yourself, friend, and Big Barry. I call him bazza.

You will die. And die, and die, and die, and die, and die, and die, and die, and die, and die, and die, and die, and die, and die, and die, and die, and oh shit level 2!, and die.

A hexagon based rougelite with card mechanics? Surely, I should of hated this thing... So, why did the sun go down?

You, the plucky little human are on the way to the outer-space holiday camp to make some repairs. Alas, something goes wrong and you are crash on the planet instead. Monsters! A bunch of rascals! Guess you better escape then!

I really detest the human character design.

They're some of the most fugly looking people I've even seen. The monsters and critters have a near 70s ish cartoon aesthetic, and the off beat humour used here really did make me chuckle when I started playing.

Alas, the little cartoon interludes quickly cease and you end up in the meat of a grind of this game. Which is fun, but if you expect a lot of what you see in the introduction and first two runs you'll end up disappointed.

Thankfully the actual game is rather several different kinds of brutal brilliance.

Health, Attack, Defence, and er, tokens. At first it appears the game is really on the basic side. And if this was it it was, a comparison of values, I'd of walked away faster.

You have 5 turns of night followed by 5 turns of day. Each rascal is weak at a certain period of the day. You need to time your movement around the map so enemies attack when they are weakest, allowing you to get in the first hit. There's so much user feedback and telegraphing on this. From the timer in the top-right, to the shield/heart indicator on the rascal, to audio and flashing alerts when the period is about to flip.
"Boy! You'd sure have to be an idiot to miss all of these and make a mistake!"
Restart the level for the 14 billionth time.

Basically, if your ATK is higher than the enemies DEF, you do the ATK damage. In full. Otherwise it ends up as a matter of block chances and damage reduction. Your precious health whittled away.

Do you risk forcing yourself forward, in the rare chance of a healing station or ability. Or do you warp back to the base. Encouraging moRe cHaoS. COrpse mUnchers. DEadly BeaSts!

The longer you stay in the zone, the harder it is going to get.

To aid you, you need to sort out a card deck. I really dislike card mechanic games, but somehow this one make it more interesting than others I have tried.

Tapping --space-- brings up your deck with your limited set of cards. And defeating enemies has a chance of dropping more.

The first few are likely just going to be +1 cards. But soon you get a +2. Or one that gives you a bonus if nothing is to the left of where you place it. Or if it is the only one of its type. Or various combinations of amounts and placements. Causing you to reshuffle and make guesses of what to keep and what to scrap.

As far as card games go, I'll admit it is rather basic... But tying this into your character stats made it a fun mini game all on its own.

Beyond the stat cards are ones granting special abilities. Long range effects to damage and disorientate. Some take up a slot. Some are applied to individual cards, and late in the game you need to choose whether or not to sacrifice that low score high ability card for something more useful.

If you can make it that far. The game is brutal in the difficulty and RNG.

I enjoyed this one. I certainly did not expect to laugh and see the passing of time as much as I did.

At one point the game had an online mechanic, with your defeats causing a card from your deck to drop into play of another player. And the same back to you. Alas the devs turned this off back in March, leaving a giant warning as you start that you are disconnected and no way to connect back in.

Oh well.

Still a load of fun.

Game Acquisition: Humble Bundle (Day of the Devs 2017)
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 - 2 September 2021
PC Used: Scorptec Master-RTX2070 2019 MK1

OS: Windows 7
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 6400+, 3.2GHz, Intel Core2 Duo E8400, 3.0GHz
Memory: 1 GB RAM
Graphics: 9800 GTX, Radeon HD 5850
Storage: 2 GB available space