I'd had my eye on Path of Achra since it launched a few months back and I'm glad to have finally given it a shot. It's a traditional roguelike much in the vein of Rift Wizard -- tons of synergistic options, quick runs, and small floor sizes with a preview of your reward when choosing the next floor. You choose a culture, class, and religion at the start of the run, each of which contributes substantially to your build, and there is a large skill tree available to everyone. This allows for a huge amount of customization -- It's an excellent game for just playing around with new builds and seeing what you can get to work.

I was able to get a victory on my second run with a summoning focused build, but it took me several tries to learn the game well enough to win with a melee build. I'd say the difficulty is on the lower end for the genre, but you can still easily die in a single turn against tough enemies if you aren't careful or haven't thought your build through well enough.

An easy recommend if you're at all interested.

This game is an arena for the build lovers, centered around intricate character building that begs you to break it. With all the skills being on-condition triggers, it provides a massive feast for those who love mechanics-heavy gameplay. Imagine the depth of playing Dredge in MTG or Wardloop in Path of Exile, but with every character embodying that level of complexity. It fulfills the aspirations I have for TOME4, offering a wealth of possibilities for diverse and imaginative builds. Beyond its gameplay, the game doesn't skimp on audio, delivering great soundtracks, and it has a little bit of intriguing lore too.

Wild to think that there are already Rift Wizard-likes out there, much less one this good; also borrows heavily from DCSS with the race-class-god character creation, from ToME4 with the insane skill trees, and possibly from... Path of Exile, with how these character perks and skills can combine with a variety of build enabling items (and most of the items in Path of Achra are potentially build enabling to some extent) to the point where if you're not deleting the screen by the end of the game you probably screwed up at some point. It does, after all, advertise itself as a "broken build sandbox", which at first makes it sound like it's some super easy power fantasy - and early runs might even give that impression - but you're really going to need to figure out how to put together and pilot these broken builds to survive the higher cycles (optional difficulty increases after each victory, with monsters getting higher stats and the player gaining more levels).