I’ve been playing Path of Achra on and off for the past few days and I have to tell you: I’m having a real good time.
As a matter of fact, the game exited Early Access on Steam today, roughly a year after it first appeared there, with a big new content drop part of the 1.0 update – the Outer Dark.
However, before I go into the specifics of the update, I’d like to share a few words on the game. If all goes to plan, these launch day impressions will precede a more complete review, but let’s see.
What is Path of Achra, then?
Path of Achra is a brutal and rugged turn-based roguelike that gives you a tremendous amount of agency and an experience that scales with your engagement. It’s simplistic tileset belies its true nature; this is a fantasy RPG with great depth and bags of personality.
There’s a lot to explore and discover, and I can already see that this is a game that could take up plenty of my/your spare time. And I’m not just saying that as a platitude either, I genuinely think this shaping up to be a bit special and the feedback I’ve seen on Steam suggests I’m not alone in that opinion.
The reason that I’m so impressed is the huge potential for emergent gameplay. Where many roguelikes are initially stingy with their items and most exciting abilities, Path of Achra gives you the ingredients you need to get cooking straight away, and the results are often spectacular.
My first run had me playing as a barbarian with a wooly beast as my sidekick. My furry friend would charge into battle ahead of me and take on all-comers while I mopped up the stragglers. Together we trudged between sombre pillars of salt and through mysterious castles, discovering more of the world as we went.
My second run ended really quickly, under a hail of arrows. I picked a less durable class and instantly regretted the choice. As you can see in the accompanying screenshot, there’s a huge range of possible character combinations to choose from.
In the next attempt of note I was playing as a pot-bellied imp. I gave this red-skinned demon fire powers (naturally) and along with his pet dragon, we torched our way through a bunch of combat encounters.
Should you follow the path?
The game is set in a harsh fantasy version of ancient Earth. This ambiguous setting has given the developer a platform for creativity that has been truly embraced, and there are loads of interesting and quirky details waiting to be unearthed, if you care to look for them.
There’s an overworld map where you can move between different biomes, and then once you’ve picked your path, you must navigate a series of procedurally generated rooms, each one filled with monsters and, if you’re lucky, loot.
Path of Achra looks low-fi and, at times, it can feel a bit more inaccessible than I think it really is. There is real depth here as you can dig into pages of lore and read blow by blow accounts of each encounter. Alternatively, you can kinda wing it, and learn as you go.
Unfortunately for me, Path of Achra has landed in a busy month – the day after Hades II, no less – and so I wanted to go on record now, on launch day, and share my initial impressions before I disappear into the ancient Greek myths of Supergiant’s action-roguelite for a bit.
Release schedule woes aside, I hope to return to the path in due course, because the first few hours of the game really captured my imagination. I want to dig into this world more, and do so while mixing and matching powerful attacks and abilities. I’ve only scratched the surface but I can see that there’s much more to discover.
The 1.0 launch update – the Outer Dark
Getting back to the business of the game’s launch, there are a few new additions, most of which will make a lot more sense to people who are already playing.
I’ll save everyone’s time by going straight the headline features, which I’ve lifted from the game’s Steam page:
- Added 8 more cycles, can now right click the cycle bar to go down in cycle
- Added Arjana, culture, apply 1 Blind when attacked, +1 stacks of Blind applied by you
- Added Myrmidon, class, +1 Inflex per 5 points of Dexterity, Block doubled against non-adjacent enemies, shield retaliates with block-scaling death damage
- Added Apophis, religion, grants you strength every time you enter a level, causes you to inflict % max life astral damage to yourself whenever you are attacked
- 4 new starting poems, from the tablet of the vizier-imp
- 3 new tracks to round out the theme of the recent ones
- Added a brief “credits” screen
Developer Ulfsire also shared a couple of tidbits about the game’s possible future following the 1.0 update. Players can likely expect to see the following added to the game over time:
- more special void areas
- more interesting / flavorful feats
- the eternal tweaks / rebalancing of items / powers
- potentially other stuff, dependin
