Originally posted by Fiesta Bot:

How is the gameplay? Is it one of those infinitely replayable games? I'm interested but it's hard to pull the trigger with no reviews

The map system feels a bit like Pokemon Mystery dungeon, but you're moving from room to room rather than moving along a room. In a way, the rooms are sort of similar to Slay The Spire, where each room contains a single instance of a certain event.

Moving one room costs 1 "mana", which is a resource you have to use, and when you run out, you can still move, but your party takes some damage on moving rooms. Luckily, you can use the gems you get / or buy, to replenish it, so I found that it isn't really much of an issue, providing you manage your resources well. I know I'm also certainly not taking optimal pathing, the game's been out for about an hour as of writing this.

Most of the game's gameplay plays similar to an autobattler, with the match 3 to upgrade idea, and the battling in this game is also similar to an autobattler in the way that enemies and allies move on their own.

The difference between this and a traditional autochess game though is that you can actually interact in battle with the gems. Each turn, you can use one of your gems, which are player based skills that can change the battle. Some gems can deal damage, some can give shields to allies, and some can heal your allies. It alleviates a bit of frustration I have with the autobattler genre in that all I can do is watch in the combat phases. I also forgot to mention, but the tribe system of autobattlers is also in this game.

In the two runs I played, the first focused on using the gems to attack the enemies, and the second focused more on defensive utility by giving my 4 person party tons of shields.

When you clear a run, you seem to get around 30 crystals[?], that act as a form of meta progression. You can spend them in this zone, 10 crystals for 1 unlock, and that either unlocks a new unit in the pool, a new "artifact" (think relics from StS) or a starting boost (eg: 10 extra gold on starting a run, which is permanent.)

As of now, there's 78 unlockables, and when you spend the crystals, you get a choice of 1 of 3 to unlock, so you can tailor the increasing pool to your choices.

The unlocks seem interesting though, as the new characters seem to enable new archetypes, and I can't wait to assemble the list fully and mess around with it.

Both runs as of now took me around 20 mins to complete, which is about the time it takes for me to finish a vanilla Slay The Spire run on low ascension.

I've also wrote a review, but most of the points are repeated from this comment, actually.