Slay the Spire looms large over the Roguelike deckbuilding genre. Arguably, it created it, so it’s hard to find a game here that doesn’t copy it. Beneath Oresa copies it. You can feel it in the way you fight, the way you build your deck, the way you progress. Take all the Slay the Spire parts away and you don’t really have a game. But that’s OK, I think, because we’ve come to a point where Slay the Spire serves as a foundation for games to build on. And I find that exciting. And Beneath Oresa is why.
Beneath Oresa
- Developer: Broken Spear Inc.
- Publisher: Broken Spear Inc.
- Platform: Played on PC
- Availability: Released 3rd Nov in Steam Early Access
The first thing is that Beneath Oresa is big, in terms of file size. It’s 4GB, a relative whopper. And I know you probably have flash-drives bigger than that – you probably had flash-drives bigger than that 10 years ago – but in the world of deckbuilding Roguelikes, that’s big, like, dinosaur big. They’re usually measured in megabytes.
What this means is that Beneath Oresa has graphics (no offence, Slay the Spire). It has proper 3D characters and environments, and swishy animations, and a cinematic eye (and camera) for using them. There’s a moment of slow-down after you charge up to enemies and whack them, for example, as if the game’s going, “Go on, do it again,” so it can string together a fancy fight scene. And if you heed the call, the game can feel genuinely action-packed, which is an odd feeling for something like this, but I like it.
This extends to the sequences between battles too. These, you usually don’t see. You just move along a map and deal with whatever the things are you arrive at. You don’t deal with the in-betweens. But here, they’re shown. Your characters run along like Batman and Robin through sewers, or whatever the environment is you’re moving through – you are literally beneath the medieval-futuristic city of Oresa – and this doubles the immersion you feel from it. And even when you arrive at your destination, you see a depiction of what your characters do when they get there, like helping each other up a ledge. They are all very nice touches.