Early Access. Turn based. 75 positive reviews and only 2 negative. Top review is below, from a guy with over 300 in steam library, and 4 written reviews.

TL;DR: Great game + great devs + great originality = great purchase. This is one of the games i dare recommend to people without attaching a caveat lector.

Three hundred seventy-three. That is, at the time of writing this review, the amount of games in my steam library. Yet despite having a fair amount of games to compare Thea too i just cannot find any combination of games that would adequate serve as a comparison. Thea manages to blend several game genres surprisingly well - you will see elements of the survival genre mixed with RPG, civilization (city-building) and roguelike-lite genre while playing the game. It also has a set of game systems that i do not recognize as being borrowed from other games in those genres. Thus, If you are looking for a refreshingly original title instead of the so-manieth title that is essentially a clone of another game you played before i can strongly recommend Thea.

Intro - What is the game about?
The premise of the game is that you are a god in a post-apocalyptic world, who managed to survive with a handful of followers. Your villagers have set up a new village and now it is up to you to make that village thrive and to uncover what happened to the world. Initially you will be focused on exploring the world around you by sending out expedition parties that map the world, find old ruins that can be looted for materials and fend of enemies that threaten your town. Meanwhile random events and an overarching main quest focusing on the fate of the world will keep you busy. If you wish to do so you are free to simply ignore the games main quest and focus on your village instead if that is your preference.

One thing of note is that the game is centered around this single village. You cannot build new villages or expand as you would in civilization-type games. Neither will you be be fielding gigantic armies to take over the world - you will instead start the game with about ten villagers in your town and thats all you have. Villagers are not a particularly renewable commodity either; They can and will die if you end up having bad luck or play poorly. Every lost villager actually hurts and this is not just due to them being a somewhat hard to replace resource. Each and every single one of your villagers has his own set of equipment, a class and a set of skills. You will know that the villager you lost was responsible for crafting half of the armors your other villagers use. You will know that the warrior that died had been around since the start of the game, slowly upgrading his stick sword to a full suit of armor and decent weaponry only to fall to a horde of skeletons. You will know all of them, and you will not want to lose any of them.

Combat, Crafting and Quests
A point of interest is the games combat system, which is unlike any i played in this type of game. Combat and some of the other games activities resolve around a card game system that determines the outcome of each event. In this card system each of your villagers is represented by a card that contains their stats, skills and abilities in combat. Each turn you and your opponent play cards until all villagers and opponents are on the table, after which the actual resolution of the fight or challenge will take place. The rules of the card system are somewhat hard to describe in a review but in practice they works rather well, creating a system that is easy to learn but hard to master. There is plenty of tactical variety to the card system that allows you to develop optimal tactics and gear for your villagers, without taking overly long. An entire fight takes 1-3 minutes at most from start to finish.

Also worth mentioning is the crafting system. The game map around the village is procedurally generated and randomly seeded with resources that can be harvested. Since you only have a single village retrieving these resources requires the formation of expedition parties that go and get them for you (Always a risk, since there are plenty of dangers on the world map). Each resource has its own quality and advantages that tie into the crafting system. For example: A recipe may have the base requirement for "Wood" and "Metal" to be added. If you add regular wood the result will be average, but if you add dark wood the crafted weapon will be stronger and have poison damage. The same applies for metal so you can mix and match the stats you want. Factor into this that each weapon type functions differently in the combat card game and you will end up with a resource gathering system that actually matters quite a bit.

I cannot write in great detail about quests since the survival gameplay keeps distracting me time and again. So far i know that the game features both a a (long) storyline quest and random event quests. The former of these is the overarching story of the game while the latter happen at random. Each random event quest i encountered so far provides the player with a situation they must react to. If you see see slave hunter what would you do? Try and convince them to hand one over to you? Try and set up an ambush? Or just charge in yelling? Or perhaps... you just want to ignore the situation and walk away. So far i haven't encountered the same random event quest twice after about 20 hours of gametime though random quests are somewhat rare. Even so i am bound to believe the developers claim that the game contains 130k words of quests text - more than the average novel.

Conclusion
Normally i like to end a review with a list of the games good and bad points but in this case i simply cannot - for the sheer reason i cannot really find any problem severe enough to warrant a specific mention. Yes, the game is early access and has a few bugs but they are being fixed exceptionally fast once reported. The developers themselves are highly active on the forum and listen and respond to criticism and suggestions which is always a plus - i think we all met companies on steam who prefer the reviled "Lock, ban and delete" approach when dealing with those matters.

Usually i don't like writing reviews that only seems to sing praise without adding a critical note since a good review balances the positive and the negative aspects of a game. In this case i will be making the proverbial exception to the rule since complaining for the sake of complaining makes even less sense. If you actually managed to reach this line by reading this entire wall of text stop wasting time and buy the game. I am nigh certain you won't regret it - though you might end up regretting a lost night of sleep or two afterwards.

I want to buy but dont feel i have the attention span for a single player game.( only logged 10 hours on pillars of eternity, 4 hours on mad max, 2 play throughs of sid meirs starships). if anyone does pick it up let me know if there is multiplayer, This could be what I'm missing in my life.