Deep Sky Derelicts

Beautiful, Hidden Gem Award, more people should play this game! Darkest Dungeon but it's a card game. It looks beautiful, the gameplay is deep, fun, and actually well thought through. Character building is super satysfying, exploration is thrilling, combat and combo potential is engaging. 10/10 Game, should be a global hit. An absolute steal on a +80% Sale, but worth the full price imo.

This is one of those games where you're thrown into a pretty complicated system with a clear goal and have to stumble your way through it until you learn how do it right. You enter a tile-based map, explore/loot as much as you can, suffer through turn-based combat until your team is nearly wiped out, manage to escape safely, recover your resources, buy persistent upgrades, and repeat this until the map is cleared and a harder one is available. The pacing of the game expects you to figure this out as you go. Enemies and exploration are easier at the start, but money is tight. Once you start figuring things out, completing maps becomes harder but you have more than enough money to experiment with options.
Figuring out how everything worked was pretty fun, but the main interesting mechanic was how the game approaches characters and deck-building. Your characters hold equipment that you can buy or loot, which contributes to their statistics but also adds cards to their personal decks. Your characters use their cards to act in combat, but these cards scale off their stats. You must balance stat upgrades and deck thinning using randomly-generated loot gained from exploration and taking risks. Your characters also belong to certain classes and can level up to receive even more card/stat/effect choices. Starting with a team of very clumsy fools and ending with a team optimised through great ordeal was the main draw of this game for me.
Though the game kept my interest enough to complete a save file, some things did test it. Some mechanics felt a little clunky to me, most disappointingly the bar where you can recruit new characters. You can have ONLY THREE characters in your team, so adding one means deleting another. In the normal game, characters can very easily be revived so you will never have an open slot through circumstance. It would have been much more interesting if character death was punished harder and if you could have more characters in your party but only take three with you when exploring. I ended up not using this mechanic at all due to its strict limitations and lack of necessity. A shame in a game where optimising a variety of characters is the main appeal.
The other thing that really tested my patience was how much of the combat was built around wasting your time. Characters have a miss rate, have evasion chance, can become invisible, can become immune to attacks, can set up cover, can be taunted, can be stunned, can be confused, can be rooted into the ground, can have certain cards blocked, etc. ALL of these options are widely distributed to both the player and the enemies, meaning much of the game is balanced around everybody constantly failing to use their cards. Some fights even take place in terrain that passively makes attack even less accurate on top of all this! This was supremely annoying to me. If you already hate turn-based combat, you will loathe how it is approached here.
Some miscellaneous thoughts:
- The game looks very cool visually and I especially liked how the robots and armour looked.
- The quests are mostly simple fetch quests but they were fine as side goals. Some characters will ramble quite a bit and I didn't really care because I was never going to see them again once I completed the fetch quests they were tied to.
- The only time I felt invested in the lore was during the conversation with the final boss because he was actually somebody important and the stuff he was explaining was pretty interesting. Too bad he was way too easy to defeat, but the final map was pretty cool, I guess.
- The DLCs add some neat stuff but they are not necessary to the overall vibe and progression of the game.
- The achievements are pretty wack for this game, which might suck for achievement hunters.
- Menus also were sometimes bugged for me, requiring restarts.
Overall, this game has a fun gameplay loop and a good sense of progression.
Don't give this game a "miss"!
Don't "evade" this experience!
This video game will leave you "stunned"!
And so on...

I wouldn't use "recommend" it feels out of place for me, I would say that if you like card games you will like Deep sky Derelicts. The downside is that the carrot which is the progress isn't fulfilling (for me), I do fight other enemies and go to other places but it has the same feeling. Maybe because visually rarely anything changes.

Darkest Dungeon in space. Nice story if you are able to read and an enjoyable based-turned combat and team building for your 6 different available classes to play. The hub feels like a comfy place and it is pretty much intuitive to use with a couple not so good things, like inventory.
Currently on my second run to try all of the classes out and still enjoying it after 40+hours.
IMO, it deserves the buy on a full price if you like turn-based combat games.

First time I played the game, I didn't get very far or knew what I was doing or what was going on. Reading a few getting-started guides helped me a lot, if you are having problems getting into this game, I highly recommend doing some reading.
That said, once i got into it, I had a hard time putting it down, very nice deck builder sci-fi game, keeping me hooked to fully explore all the 'dungeons' (which are derelict space ships in this game). Graphics, music and sound all fit the game perfectly.
The only issue I had was the buggy interface, sometimes clicks would not register, other times buttons would be missing, and so on, little things, but annoying when they happen. I was running this game on Linux, so it could be a bug in Proton, I can't confirm this, as I have no windows pc available.

3/5 stars
Picked it up on sale for ~$4 and I would say that was worth it. However the game is plagued with bugs that have existed for literal years. When you check the forums you see posts dated back to 2020 and older documenting issues that still persist today. I would recommend that you save often as you can expect to have to restart the game once an hour as you will encounter a progression halting bug. Reloading a save seems to fix most bugs, however there is a particularly irritating bug that will lock you out of the menu and most of the buttons. So to reiterate:
SAVE OFTEN OR WILL LOSE HOURS OF PROGRESS.
Final verdict. It's a fun rogue like dungeon crawler with plethora of content and builds to explore. However, the game is plagued with bugs and I would only recommend picking it up on sale <$5

Great game.

It's a very fun game to play daily for one or two hours, until it's finished. Upgrading your party's equipment and skills is very fun. Fighting is fun, but may become repetitive, if you keep one fighting style for a majority of the game. It's in your hands to switch it up and keep the thrill going.

The story elements, especially those regarding side missions, are really funny! It's fun to read the stories, quests and "needs" of random scavengers and other entities on ships. :)

For example, you can complete a quest chain, proving or not, that you are a critically thinking sceptic.
Other times, you involve yourself in rivalries, conspiracies and simple assassination requests, where *you* decide, which side of the quest you take. You can usually choose, whether you take a quest at all, decide to attack the quest giver or kill those, who the quest giver wants killed.
This game has an astonishing amount of story RPG elements, where you can express your choice of outcome for certain missions. It's rare to find a modern game, where you can actually kill the quest giver. :)

Small "spoiler" (not really story spoiler, just a spoiler of how the ending felt like).
The ending was extremely anti-climactic. It was just another encounter. I literally one-shot (yes, just one attack card from my Lethal Bruiser was enough) the so-called "end-boss" with my professionally trained and heavily armed party of battle-proven soldiers.

The worst part about the game is the lack of party variety within a single playthrough. You may *dismiss* party members, to get new ones, however, those dismissed are not wait on the bench, waiting to be swapped out, back on the field. They are just gone. This is something really lacking.
Provide the player with multiple equipment-, skill- and party roaster kits. Make it swappable for each time you visit a ship. This would add sooo much value to this gem.

Played this gem on PC and Steam Deck. On Steam Deck (or controller, too?) there are many bugs. One or two game breaking. However, nothing that cannot be solved with going out of some menu or, worst case, reload your last save. Since you can save all the time you want, this ought to be no issue of importance.

Overall, very nice game and very well worth the money, especially on discount.

I am very excited for Deep Sky Derelicts II. Hoping for the sequel!