Thea 2: The Shattering smashes into early access
Become as gods
Today we become as gods again in Thea 2: The Shattering, guiding our wee tribe of believers through a fantasy post-apocalypse rooted in Slavic mythology. It's the sequel to 2015's Thea: The Awakening, a game described by Rob Zacny as "a survival 4X RPG roguelike with crafting and card combat" in our lukewarm Thea: The Awakening review. That's a lot going on and it didn't all work the first time, but Thea was still different and interesting enough that a sequel coming along to tidy it up sounds grand. If you'd rather not do early access, hey, it should be finished in six months or so.
MuHa Games expect to launch the full version of Thea 2 in about six months. They say this initial early access release is "fully playable and mostly feature-complete", with both singleplayer and co-op (a feature added to the first game months after launch). They do say that "some mechanics, adventures, and graphical assets are missing" and they also plan to add Steam Workshop support for mods while tweaking and fixing things along the way.
Somehow I'd missed our Brendan's two-part Thea 1 diary from 2016, recounting tragedy in the village of Bilge Finger with a cast of characters including Stab King, Facekicker Pat, Bucket Girl, a baby found in the cabbage patch, and a talkative mole. That's great. What is this game? This game sounds great (not just because of the names Brendy picked).
Thea 2: The Shattering is out now on Steam Early Access. The usual price is £20/€22/$25, and the same should be true for the full version, but right now it has a 10% launch discount.