Built to Spec

(Banner art created by Kruggsmash)

Do you like roguelikes? Not roguelites, likes. Old school turn based grid-staring action? Games where you have to interpret a grid of sprites that hate your little guy and the only thing that improves from attempt to attempt is you?

Path of Achra is one of those. And it’s so fucking good.

Despite having some genuinely effective writing PoA is mechanics-first, so this review will be too. 99%+ of your time spent here will be spent on contemplating what to click on, be it a tile or a new broken ability to play around with. This ain’t silent reading hour, this is a playground for people who like violence and when the number goes up.

If you’ve played Rift Wizard this feels a lot like that, but much less difficult (don’t worry, there are settings to crank that if you need ’em). Instead it wants you to experiment with its thousands of possible character builds, figure out what to steer into skill-wise, pivot if your build isn’t quite coming together, and clear legions of mooks in the process. How you go about that is where the actual game lies. Every run starts with the selection of your culture, class, and religion, all of which significantly modify everything your character is and what happens when they pray to their god of choice. From there you’re given 10 skill points to invest in a menu with so many options it makes The Cheesecake Factory look reasonable. 

Do not fear The Grid, it is where the fun lives. Want a dodge tank who takes 3 turns for every 1 their opponents get? What if they fired arc lightning everywhere each time they swung their cool saber? And swung multiple times per turn because they’re just that fast and it directly scales? Sounds pretty cool right?

That’s bush league. Amateur hour. Sure it can win, but it’s arguably not even good. Summon legions of ooze monsters and fill every tile that doesn’t have you or enemies on it. Shapeshift into a tree that can still punch. Start a cult and watch your army perform coordinated strikes on your opps. Literally fall asleep and unleash a magical maelstrom for every turn you’ve succumbed to supernatural narcolepsy. Become a goblin and eat every piece of gear you encounter, because that’s how you get big and strong. None of these are a joke. These aren’t even the complicated ones! Every last ability in this can be built around or support a different concept, and that’s a nigh unprecedented level of murderous creativity.

I guess I could level criticisms at Achra if I really tried? There’s not a ton of variety in terms of the actual opposition. Enemy types are varied but you fight most of them every run. Gear will become familiar fairly quickly. In a lesser roguelike this would present a problem, but Achra runs are surprisingly short and significantly more focused on you, the player, as opposed to your surroundings. If most roguelikes are a Ninja Warrior course you have to learn to navigate after 100s of attempts, Achra is a block fort where you get to build your own impractical construction vehicle and bulldoze through. It’s the best kind of power trip because when you fail you’ll laugh, and when you succeed you’ll laugh harder.

Look, we get a lot of roguelikes these days. Any given genre has received at least a few attempts to make it run-based, and most of them neither respect your time nor your intelligence. I cannot tell you how refreshing it is to play a roguelike that isn’t interested in anything other than providing the highest quality violence with as many levers to pull as possible. I thought I had come down with Roguelike Fatigue, but it turns out I just needed to play something especially good, and Path of Achra is.

9/10