It took a little while for Path of Achra to really sink its fangs in, but after coming back to it again and again in recent weeks, I’ve come to think of it as warmly as any game I’ve played so far this year, despite the fact that it presents a stern first impression.
Path of Achra is a turn-based roguelike with a focus on arena combat and outrageous character builds. Yes, it looks somewhat simplistic with its rigid tilesets and basic backgrounds, but as we’ve seen so many times in the roguelike genre, this simplicity is there to facilitate a dizzying array of potential gameplay outcomes.
Creative character building
At first your options are limited, but it won’t take long before you start unlocking plenty of different character customisation options. Indeed, I’d say that the process of building your character at the start of each run sits at the very heart of the experience.
You get to choose your character’s culture, their class, and then the god that they worship. Each of these factors makes a major difference to your eventual build, and when you consider that you can mix and match across these three categories via a growing pool of options – it feels like the possibilities are endless.
For your culture, you might pick the standard human, make him a basic warrior, and then have him worship some sort of military god. This would allow you to find synergies in martial combat that give you extra health points and better damage output. Once you’ve unlocked a few options, however, you’ll have a broad array of races, classes, and gods to choose from as you build a character for each new attempt.
First steps on the Path of Achra
Things get even more interesting once you start down the path, and your already complex character becomes even more nuanced. You start each run chased by rising flood waters and armed with points to spend.
There are several specialisms to choose from. Your options include boring but useful martial abilities, standard fantasy magic abilities such as fire and ice spells, but also more unusual powers that allow you to inflict plague, summon snakes or even cast blood magic where you must damage yourself in order to inflict huge pain on your enemies.
You can mix and match these powers across three different areas, and later on during any given run, if you dump enough points into one or two specific classes, you can further specialise down a route and get additional bonuses. Put simply: you’ve got tons of options.
For all that variety, your first steps are fairly predictable. You must edge around each new arena one tile at a time, until all of the enemies are dead. Oncer the level is cleared you can essentially fast travel to whichever tile you want. Enemies don’t drop loot, however, many levels have one or more loot tiles, and simply clicking on them sends you over to grab whatever is sitting there.
Speaking of loot, there’s tons of it all over the place, although most of it won’t be useful to you. That’s no problem, however, as simply recycling unwanted items boosts the efficacy of whatever you’ve got selected. It doesn’t take long before you’ve got an inventory filled with gear and you’re able to pick out some cool stuff and then recycle the rest to make your chosen gear a little bit better.
Death or glory
Your progress through the wider world usually means picking from two different locations as the sea rises behind you. Some places are smaller and involve fighting through a couple of different arenas, whereas a tower might involve multiple floors filled with a broader range of enemy types. Both the two-track overworld map and the environments you battle in are quite basic to behold, but the spartan aesthetic – and the detailed log – does enough communicate the detail you need to make informed decisions.
It’s not uncommon that you’ll stumble into a combat encounter with a new enemy type and find yourself in a world of trouble. A build that has been thoughtfully assembled and well-tested might suddenly come undone by a powerful magical creature that takes you down with a couple of swipes. Thus is the nature of Path of Achra; learning from those painful mistakes only enhances future strategies and provokes deeper experimentation at the build stage.
Like all traditional roguelikes, the game uses procedural generation to build its battlefield, and sometimes the machine will kick out a challenge that your current build simply isn’t equipped to deal with. It sucks when that happens, I’ll concede that, but it’s also the fire wherein your most valuable experience is forged.
A typical run doesn’t take too long but even if you do fall early, the fleeting stab of disappointment is usually quick to heal as you load up another game. Your next build might be an elaboration of your last failed attempt, this time destined for glory thanks to lessons learned on your last journey, or you could try something completely different.
There is considerable depth for those who want it with lore and stats on top of the huge range of potential character builds and item combos. Getting to the good stuff does mean reading a lot of text, and sometimes the combinations you concoct will create outcomes that you didn’t predict, but this volatility is also part of the charm, I think. If you’re after a roguelike that truly rewards curiosity and creativity, look no further than Path of Achra.
