"Walk the Path"
Path of Achra is a turn-based roguelike game by the independent developer Ulfsire. While it's technically in Early Access (as of October 2023), it has a completed story with a final boss. Path of Achra is heavily inspired by modern roguelikes such as Rift Wizard and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. The player is given control of a Pilgrim, who is quested by their god to reach a mysterious black obelisk at the edge of the world as the land floods behind them.
Path of Achra boasts around 50 powers to choose from, based on ten elements. Rather than being activated manually, most powers are passive, activating when triggered by in-game events (for example, a power which activates when you attack an enemy). It's possible for powers to trigger other powers, and even the gear you can pick up and equip has passive abilities of its own, leading to an absurd number of possible (and often complicated) synergies. For this reason, Path of Achra is often (affectionately) described as a "broken build sandbox".
By the end of the Path, your character's every move might trigger such an apocalyptic maelstrom of damage, self-buffing, damage, ally summoning, damage, teleportation, more damage, ally buffing, even more damage, healing, and all the damage ever that, even examining the in-game log, you might find it tough to work out exactly what just happened!
The setting of Path of Achra draws inspiration from Dark Souls, both in its dark fantasy tone and how it is presented in-game. There is little narration or dialog, with the lore instead being drip-fed to the player through descriptions of enemies and character options. The worldbuilding is deep and strange, describing a world on the verge of disaster where civilization may have already collapsed, with a heavy focus on religion and faith. Choosing a god to worship is a mandatory part of character creation, and many of the character classes are priests of some sort (including one actually called a Priest). Additionally, each god offers three Prayers, Path of Achra's only manually activated abilities, which grant the Pilgrim divine power.
Path of Achra is available on Steam
and has a free demo.
- After the End: Depending on how you interpret the lore, the end of civilization is either in progress or has already happened. Either way, your character will encounter many ruined and desolate places on the Path, and a rising ocean presses them ever forward.
- Ambiguous Ending: It's unclear whether the King of Many Colors' defeat saves the world, or merely stops him from moving on to threaten other worlds. The Pilgrim thanks their god for victory, but all that's left is them in a tower surrounded by darkness... then another Pilgrim starts on the Path.
- Ambiguously Human: The Stran, Naqui and Alhaja cultures all look human, but it's not clear if they are. Some of the other cultures are very obviously an entirely different species.
- Ambiguous Situation: Everything — the descriptions for character options, enemies, and items imply a surprisingly detailed world, but very little of what it means is explained.
- Why is the world flooding? Nothing in-game either confirms or denies that the King of Many Colors is behind it. Later updates imply the Towers are what's causing the sorry state of the world, but that raises as many questions as it answers.
- Is there any civilization left? The cultures all describe people from normalish areas, but in the game the Pilgrim only ever travels through ruins and monster-infested wildernesses and Towers.
- Many enemies are implied to be or explicitly are hunting the Pilgrim to try to stop their quest. Are these enemies the King of Many Colors' minions, just random barbarians, or is something else going on?
- Anti-Frustration Feature:
- If your character dies, you can use them in an endless mode called the Path of Dust.
- Fought your way through a whole zone, only to end up with worthless loot? You can sacrifice it to enhance your already-existing gear and raise your max HP!
- After you've cleared a screen, you can Flash Step to the exit or any remaining loot item in a single turn. Not only is this convenient, but it can even save your character on occasions where you beat all the enemies, but were inflicted with too many stacks of poison and/or scorch to survive walking to the exit.
- While you usually have a choice on where to go next on the Path, and even previews of the items and enemies to be found in each zone, earlier builds of the game would make some of the enemies unknown (with only cryptic hints about them in the zone's description), particularly in Towers and forbidden temples. Eventually, the game did away with this mystery, always previewing all enemies in detail and allowing players to make a fully educated choice about where to go next.
- Are you the sort of player who always forgets to use their consumable items before you're already dead? Then Path of Achra smiles upon you, because prayers are your only consumables, and if your charges in any of your three prayers are full (because you haven't been using them), then your god will take all those charges to save you from death.
- Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism: Male Qamar look like men with tails and violet skin. Female Qamar are like that, too, but also have metal plating covering parts of their bodies.
- Came Back Strong: If the Pilgrim dies with a fully charged prayer, their god will restore them to life at the cost of the prayer charges. There are some classes and cultures which permanently gain stats from this.
- Cycle of Hurting: The player can (and should) inflict this on enemies. Using attacks which trigger other attacks which trigger other attacks is crucial for most builds in the late game, where enemies have thousands of health but the player only does a few hundred damage per hit.
- Dark Is Not Evil: Want to wield the powers of Necromancy and make "unleashing hordes of the undead upon anyone who stands in my way" your default strategy? No problem, you're still The Hero and there's at least one god who will help you summon even more undead.
- The Dog Was the Mastermind: On release, the game had three Towers which functioned like optional dungeons on the player's quest. The Towers work like normal areas, but end on a boss fight in exchange for more loot. At first, they may seem like just gameplay content, but later lore heavily implies the Towers are what's destroying the world… in some way.
- Early Game Hell: Once the player has a workable build, the game isn't that hard… but getting that build created in the first place can be tricky.
- Eldritch Abomination:
- The Preta enemies are "hungry ghosts" that come from outside the Astral Wall. They are procedurally generated with chaotic forms and powers no two of whom look the same. They get stronger as the days pass, which implies the end of the world is empowering them somehow.
- Everything that exists above the Obelisk is some variant of an Eldritch Horror. The King of Many Colors is one of the tamest ones, since he at least resembles some sort of flesh and blood creature rather than the hordes of demons made of abstract substances, living geometric designs, and star parasitoids the player encounters.
- Eldritch Location: Whatever is beyond the Astral Wall is certainly this as everything from there is a reality-breaking Eldritch Abomination. The Preta enemies don't even have a fixed form.
- Even Evil Has Standards: One enemy, the skin priest, is called an apostate of Eresh, which implies even Eresh is disgusted with their misuse of necromancy.
- Evil Versus Oblivion: Some of the gods you can follow, particularly Eresh, seem like... not very nice beings. Yet even they want to help you survive to the end of the Path and save the world.
- Fallen Hero: It's ambiguous, but the opening poem implies the King of Many Colors hadn't originally come to Achra as an invader. It seems he came to Achra only seeking to survive… something, then became corrupted somehow.
- The Fundamentalist: Fitting the game's religious motif, there are multiple character classes that suggest this trope.
- Foreshadowing: One of the poems that can appear at the start of the run is called "Phenomenology of the King" — and guess who the final boss is.
- Generic Doomsday Villain: We never learn much about the King of Many Colors beyond that he's invading the world from outside it. But to be fair, we don't learn much about anything, really. Later updates give some more hints to his true nature, however.
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Genius Bonus:- There are a lot of items, skills and prestige classes with odd names. It may be easy to think these are invented words, but most of them are real words taken from many different languages.
- Pretas or "Hungry Ghosts" are a type of entity in real world Eastern religions, though they're a lot different in real life religions than their incarnation in this game.
- God Is Good: The gods aren't flawless, but they do aid their Pilgrim's quest and will even save them from death from time to time.
- Humanoid Abomination: The King of Many Colors. Unlike all the other trippy demon entities you'll encounter above the Obelisk, he at least resembles a flesh and blood human. But he's the toughest thing in the game and he can summon one of those trippy demons to his side for free every round, so he's obviously an eldritch abomination himself.
- The Legions of Hell: Red demons of varying power are among your many enemies on the Path. But other, more eldritch types of demons oppose you, too.
- Light Is Not Good: The King of Many Colors is described as a "master of distorted light" and his demons have a rainbow motif.
- Mind Screw: The plot and world look simple at first glance, but after playing through the game and uncovering the lore, it becomes clear just how truly bizarre the setting is. What is the shape of the world and where is the Astral Wall? How are the Towers destroying reality? What forced the King of Many Colors to invade Achra? And what is the place beyond the Astral Wall?
- Ms. Fanservice: The Qamar Culture can be played as male, but the female character, who looks like a purple woman in a Chainmail Bikini and mask, is the default on the character creation screen. Qamar are described as dancers, and they get bonuses for not wearing armor.
- Our Demons Are Different: Achra has two types of demon. The first are classic, red-skinned beings said to be from the infernal plane. The second, actually called demons, are the surreal minions of the King of Many Colors who came from outside known reality and aren't even made of living material.
- Scaled Up: One of the many abilities available to the player is transforming into a snake. In this form, the player's speed and attack range are cut, but they gain armor which can be stacked an unlimited amount.
- Shed Armor, Gain Speed: The heaviest armors not only incur Encumbrance (which reduces your Dodge and Speed ratings if your Strength can't handle it), but also raise your Inflexibility, which divides your Speed and your Willpower bonus to damage.
- Squishy Wizard: Many characters with elemental powers emphasize Willpower over Strength (and Martial skills), so wearing heavy armor would hurt them more than it would help.
- Teleport Spam: Astral powers feature a lot of this.
- Token Evil Teammate: Eresh is probably the most malevolent of the gods you can follow, given that she rewards you when your allies and minions die.
- Trash Talk: Among the few lines of dialog in the game are threatening greeting statements from Tower bosses (at least the ones who can speak). They are particularly fond of referring to you as "little pilgrim".
- Would Hurt a Child: The Obar are described as not just Monstrous Humanoid brutes, but child-eaters.
