Bite-size arena battle roguelike and self-professed "broken build sandbox" Path of Achra has hit its 1.0 release. Developer Ulfsire's game is now finished, for whatever that means in a modern game. "I'm pretty much excrutiatingly grateful to you all who have helped bring it here, and 1.0 of course won't be the end of updates," posted Ulfsire.
The 1.0 release comes with a new culture, class, and god to add to the pick-three piles that make up a character. The new Arjana warriors blind enemies with magic tattoos. The new Myrmidon class is penalized for getting more dextrous but very good at blocking ranged attacks. The final new thing is the god Apophis, who makes you ever-stronger as you progress but slowly kills you via self-damage. I dunno. Sounds like just another snake cult.
Path of Achra stands out from more traditional rogulikes in that it's a series of battles against enemies in small arena-like dungeon areas, between which you rack up new equipment and gear to kitbash a crazy build of some kind on the fly. It's basically a very distilled version of many others in the genre—just cutting out a lot of the resource and inventory management in between the life-and-death combats.
The big addition in 1.0 for people who're deep into Achra are eight new cycles, the Achra equivalent of a difficulty or ascension tier. The real outcome of this will probably be some sickos coming up with absolutely busted new builds. There'll also be four new poems to start your runs and three new entries on the soundtrack.
Though it has been out for a while, I first saw Path of Achra a couple months ago and was pretty happy with it. There have been steady updates since, adding new gods, classes, and peoples to play as—and to be honest the 1.0 was the surprise culmination of a steady trickle of updates adding new stuff.
You can find Path of Achra on Steam for $10, though it's 20% off until May 21.
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