Beneath Oresa

This is 99% of an awesome game, and ALMOST could've had an "Overwhelmingly Positive" status on Steam.
The art style and graphics are super cool! There's excellent animations for all of the unique abilities!
The decks are very interesting and fun to play, the roguelike mechanics make playthroughs interesting, the difficulty scales just enough to keep things fun, and it plays quite differently than other similar games thanks to some unique mechanics!

However, NONE of these mechanics are clear going in.
There is NO legitimate tutorial, guidance, or any help figuring out the game.
There is some incomplete documentation in a 'help' page, but nothing more.

A majority of the negative reviews are all pointing to this same issue, and a significant amount of players just had to give up.

I personally fully read a guide on the steam community page before going in, and I DEFINITELY would have given up if not for that:
This game is heavily built around the need to defend, much more than attacking, and this is something that isn't obvious when first entering the game.
Not only this, but the starting character is a 'virus' type, meaning you need to gain power by building up viruses without letting them overwhelm your hand and destroying you. Wow! What a cool mechanic!
So, why don't they explain this? Literally the tooltip text I just typed would have helped a lot.

Also, why is the starting character leveraging such a unique mechanic? With no Tutorial?

I still recommend the game, if you are willing to look up a guide.
It's just a real shame that the Devs can't just add a basic tutorial and turn this into the Overwhelmingly Positive game it deserves to be.

A very fun and challenging card game that I received in a Humble Choice Bundle.
It can be a bit difficult and takes a learning curve, but at the point of the review I completed Level 2 of 3.
It made the bundle worth the $12 I paid just for the enjoyment I am getting from this game alone.

This game deserves WAY more recognition! It is an absolute blast to play because of the music, the atmosphere, and most especially the wonderful mechanics I don't think I've seen in other deckbuilders. The fact that some cards grant you bonuses if they are auto-discarded instead of being played is such an interesting way to approach how a round is played. Aside from Fights in Tight Spaces, I think this game also exemplifies a new standard other deckbuilders should live up to in regards to having epic cinematic animations play out whenever you play a card. That attention to style, detail, and production really helps bolster an otherwise already awesome card game.

I am actually shocked at all the negative reviews, comparing this game to Slay the Spire and then complaining about the difficulty curve. How can you play Slay the Spire and write a review saying this game is hard and unbalanced? Slay the Spire is one of the sweatiest roguelike deckbuilders out there, one mistake and you are toast... This game is much more forgiving and even without a proper tutorial or introduction to the game mechanics, if you play good enough you can beat the game or at least get pretty deep into it, while not popping your forehead veins. The game is fun, has an awesome presentation (much better than most games from this genre), the actual real complain I can agree with is the lack of tutorial or proper explanation of game mechanics, but then again, you've played games from the same genre before, you should be able to successfully pick up the game's mechanics as you go along, which is a testament that the game's difficulty curve is different from what people are writing down here.
To all the people review bombing this game: have you tried getting better at the game? Have you tried learning the game's mechanics? Have you tried playing more than one or two runs? The whole point of the genre is that you are going to lose when you first start so that you come back better and more capable of dealing with the game's difficulty! The whole point of the genre is difficulty and people complain about the difficulty? Get good, get better or just reconsider your options before getting into the genre.

After my first few runs, I was about to post a negative review complaining about undertuned characters, mechanics I did not fully understand and nitpicking to convince myself I was right. You will likely find many frustrated reviews from players that did not give Oresa a fair chance or just taking a skill issue L. I'm really glad that I gave it one more chance, because boy was I wrong. When this game clicks for you, *it's a ride*.
First thing you need to know is that this is not your average cookie-cutter deckbuilder, there's not much room for mistakes and fumbling a single card play could end your run. There's no meta progression and it's not easy to break the game with an OP build. Every single fight is a challenge and you have to consider your moves very carefully.
I call this game the "deckbuilder's deckbuilder" - it's not easy to get into, but if you enjoy fine-tuning your deck and taking your time optimizing every card play, there's nothing more thrilling out there (that I know of). I've played all the big ones - StS, Griftlands, Monster Train, Vault of the Void, Balatro, D&D Gamblers, Astrea, Inscryption, Gordian Quest. Nothing has ever made me feel so excited to pull off a combo and narrowly escape death.
Each character has a unique skill and on top of that there's three character classes with their own gimmicks, both of which considerably affect gameplay. They might be hard to figure out initially, but mastering them feels extremely rewarding.
Oresa has also the best implementation of, uh, "distance mechanisms" I've seen so far. Positioning and movement in games like Gordian Quest feels awkward and I'd enjoy the gameplay more if it just wasn't there.
Oresa pulls it off almost flawlessly. There's no grids, movement range, moves-per-turn limits etc. It's brilliantly simple - a melee attack moves you near the target, a ranged attack doesn't move you, an attack with knockback moves the enemy away and an attack with evasion moves you away from the enemy. In a single turn you can knock your enemies close together, hit them with an AoE then escape.
The game feel is superb, fluid animations of combos give your actions weight and make the experience truly immersive, you *are* the fighter. Graphic design is just beautiful, the amount of love put into this gem is palpable.
I also have to applaud the devs for making save scumming hard. Most deckbuilders allow you to quit and reload to start a fight from the beginning, and it can really suck the fun out of a game if you're prone to perfectionism.
Do yourself a favor, try it and give it time to grow on you - it really pays off.
Also - Nereide is bae and Anarak is the goodest boy.

Live to fight another day
This mantra is all you need to be successful in Beneath Oresa. The developers have chosen a different approach to the game design with this one. Heavily leaning on defense for the deckbuilding instead of offence. I guess the struggle you’ll have with the battles is totally intended and should definitely challenge you.
If you look for a fast successful run during the lunchbreak, where you build your godlike character and kill everything right, left and center… I have bad news for you, that’s not it.
Because your HP is very limited and can be extinguished in a heartbeat, your decisions about the cards and journey have a huge impact on your future progress. Undecided about the card choice… take the defensive one. Have a nice DMG card and a good defensive card… you already know, what to take.
Each fight you need carefully look at the situation and analyze your opponents, because they have a lot of different abilities. You need to look at the attack pattern and exploit it to your advantage. And even if you have done everything correctly, sometimes they’ll hit you like a truck anyway. That’s why you need to remember the mantra above and don’t let discourage you from trying again. Because the game and card mechanics are very well designed. It’s very satisfying to craft the deck for the characters and their unique mechanics. The gameplay and battles are very fluent once you understand how to survive your journey. And even if you die often, the game is very generous with the EXP, so you can unlock all the relevant characters in no time.
I also recommend the great “Basic Overall Guide” by Hypocrite in the guides section of the steam page. His guide will give you a lot of insight, how become successful in Beneath Oresa.

The game did everything to ward me off, but I summoned my inner MTG veteran, gritted my teeth, and prevailed in liking this game :) It was difficult though - the game likes to shoot own feet repeatedly and it is not what it seems at first.

When you first launch it - it looks like a cartoonish superhero battler with cards. Should be nice to throw some cards around, smashing enemies, right?

WRONG!

The game is actually built in a way that simply drafting good cards is not enough for the win. You get outdamaged by bosses hopelessly, and the only way to deal with that is to lean heavily into the game's mechanics, and this game is built around one of more complicated mechanics - card manipulation across different zones. Everything in this game is represented by a card. When you get poisoned - a poison card is added to your draw pile, and when you draw it - what damages you is its "on discard at the end of turn" trigger, unless you deal with it somehow. So there is a million effects of all sorts of cards creation. Some are beneficial and some are not, cards may be created in your draw pile, or discard pile, or in hand, sometimes permanently, sometimes not. That all could be fine, but the game does a terrible job of helping player to make sense out of it all. There are no visual cues whatsoever. Say you drew a card that was generated by an effect - will it persist after you play it? or if you discard it - will it get exiled or will it get shuffled back to your deck? It's all defined by a tiny subtype line - a Fleeting card, or Fading card, or Volatile card, or Consumable card, they all function differently but look all the same. There are a lot of keywords and special types, but the game does no effort at all to explain what these are for. Like Program type for example (with an eye) - these usually represent permanent effects that persist until end of battle, triggering whenever a certain condition is met. Except that the very first Program card you ever see in the game is the only Program card that instead does a one-off thing and then creates a single-use delayed trigger that is looking for an event that is neither explained nor keyworded. Who does that to new players? How did stuff like that get through early access?

People complain about total lack of tutorial (which is true), but that's only part of it. In general this game has very big issues with being clear about how things work and what is happening exactly. Like they've never heard of templating: it's common for a card to have 3 different effects that are all just... text. Sometimes it's not obvious whether you need to play a card to get that effect, or whether it would trigger from just having the card in your hand, or maybe you don't even need to have it in your hand, as some effects work in all zones?... Similar effects may use different wording, making you doubt whether effects are actually the same, or there is a subtle difference you don't understand. Effects may promise to create cards, but there is no way to preview those cards to understand what these do (like how new players are supposed to know what are Combat Bot cards the starting companion grants you?). Enemies may say they would curse you, but you have no idea what effect would that be until you draw it later. And when you draw it - you have no way of telling what was the source of it. There is an enemy that threatens it will trigger something nasty once it puts 5 curses into your hand - and to this day after more than a dozen runs I have no idea what does it do exactly. After playing probably a 100 battles I'm still not sure which card types count towards the hand size limit and which do not... And the list goes on.

Once you push through all that - getting smacked by bosses, reading every line in the help section for the 10th time hoping it would finally make sense, figuring out what cards actually do though the process of trial and error, familiarising with 124 possible modifiers you choose from randomly during your runs - then you can start putting pieces together, creating sensible strategies, enjoying deep synergies and elaborate card interactions - and the game begins to shine, because actual mechanics in it are very smart.

One of families of heroes for example draws power from self-poisoning. You generate Virus cards that damage you if you have these at your hand at the end of turn, but you trigger various benefitial effects depending on amount of Virus cards in your deck. So there are multiple strategies how to deal with it - you can focus on effects that would put Virus cards from your draw pile straight to discard, bypassing your hand. Or you may instead try to scoop all Virus cards into your hand and play a card that scales from it. Or you may have effects that remove Viruses permanently, so you can cleanse yourself after you've reaped Virus effects you wanted. That all creates interesting dynamic, where you want Virus cards but you also don't, and 3 heroes interact with these Virus card differently. Another family is built around the concept of counter-attack. You build a special meter and a lot of cards care about its value, so you need to have means to move it up and down (e.g. you don't want to waste the counter on a minion's poke, but wait until a boss swings at you), not to mention that the card pool is completely different. The third family is about gunslinging, where you have bullets as a resource you need to manage, and also feels completely different mechanically. Between 9 heroes and many different companions there is a good variability in the approach that makes actual runs interesting. I had a few where I had a crazy card advantage engine going, making cards jump from zone to zone, playing them multiple times, generating 6-10 free attacks per turn, and that felt fantastic. I had plenty where all good cards I drafted just didn't work together well enough too. It's an interesting experience actually, that I appreciate and recommend - provided you can get through all the clunkiness.

As a closing comment - try not to dismiss the game until you unlock Jokan (which you do after a run or two). Pair him with Sora and see how it goes. That was the first run I truly enjoyed - his game strategy is very straightforward, it's easy to understand what you need to do - you flood your deck with Viruses and focus on making sure your enemies run out of HP first, which you absolutely can do, as the damage scaling you can achieve just goes off the charts. This feeling when a plan comes together and actually works is very satisfying and makes you want to repeat this experience with other pairs, which leads you into yet another run.