Thea 2: The Shattering Review

One of my all-time favorite sci-fi movies is Sunshine. I expect most of you have never heard of it before, which is understandable because it’s presented as yet another dumb disaster action movie in the style of The Core and Armageddon. In Sunshine, the Sun is dying and Earth’s top scientists have determined that the only way to fix it is to nuke it. It starts out supremely stupid but slowly descends into Lovecraftian psychological horror starring the Sun as the eldritch horror flaying the minds of mortals. I love this interpretation because in almost all mythologies and stories I’m aware of, the light is safety and the dark is the enemy, when in reality the light has the potential to be just as dangerous as the dark if not more so. This cultural subversion, however slight, doesn’t come around very often. Strictly speaking, Thea 2: The Shattering has been telling this story since late November, but I don’t trust Early Access games anymore. Last week it was properly finished and I was excited to take a look.

In Thea 2, you play as a small group of survivors trying to make your way in a post-apocalyptic Slavic fantasy world with the help of a guiding deity. Thanks to the heroes in first game, Thea: The Awakening, the world hasn’t been reclaimed by darkness and monsters, but it’s still in bad shape because some idiots decided burning down the World Tree would be a good idea. As The Chosen of one of Thea’s many gods, it is the player’s duty to nurture the new World Tree as it grows and protect it against not only the scattered remnants of humanity and creatures of the dark, but a new threat from the light. The world has begun to break open, releasing alien servants of the light who seek to bring unity and peace to the world through spiritual erasure and mind control. Beset on all sides with hostility, players must gather resources, craft armaments and complete quests to understand and tame the world.

Playing Thea 2 is like playing Civilization but scaled down in every aspect. The player will only ever have one town to care for except in rare circumstances, the population of that town will measure in tens not millions, any new resources must be gathered by expeditions sent away from the town, and any fighting that happens can only be described as a skirmish at the most gracious. Further separating it from other 4X games, players will be completing quests that range in scale and importance from helping a father find his lost daughters to understanding the origins of the strange light creatures scouring the world.

To me, Thea 2’s greatest strength is in its customization. Throughout the game, players are given the ability to shape their time in Thea 2 to an impressive degree. This is immediately apparent on starting a new game. Thea 2, like its predecessor, has a variety of gods to choose from to act as the patron of the playable survivors, providing a variety of passive benefits, but only two are unlocked from the beginning. However, the two that are unlocked are randomly chosen for each player. Once a patron god has been selected, players then choose their beginning party and resources from options limited by the god’s domains, varying from a season warrior to advanced tools to animal companions. During the gameplay, players will gather resources to turn into equipment and city expansions, but the resources players choose in the construction of these things will change the quality and properties of what they build, meaning that while players may have several swords, most will be made of different materials, gaining different abilities. The drawback of this system is that the materials that can be used to make gear and buildings is also randomly determined at the outset of the game, so players can be stuck in a bizarre world where metal and wood can’t be made into a sword until further research is performed. It usually works out well enough but players can get the short end of the deal very early on, leading to some early frustration and game abandonment.

The second biggest feature of Thea 2 are the quests. Obviously, to save the world, heroes can’t just sit around at home, making newer and better swords, they have to gather information and allies to stop the big bad whatever-it-is. There are an excellent variety of quests, making the world feel alive. My favorite so far was discovering a frog-demon known as a “Cmuch” whose friends and home had vanished. After several talks with a local witch and a rather elaborate ritual, the cmuch turned out to be a merfolk prince under the power of a curse. Upon restoration, he explained he had seen the alien light creatures from within the world and was able to provide some helpful information. He was also strikingly handsome, so obviously one of my villagers slept with him and ended up with a powerful boost to magic power and a very strange STD. I don’t know if this is especially fanciful for Slavic mythology, but as I have very little exposure to Slavic lore I love the mixture of poetic grandiosity and low-brow humor these quests display. Most of the quests are further enhanced by voice narration. As far as I can tell, there’s a cast of 3-4 voice actors that narrate quests for you, meaning that the pace of the game never slows down thanks to long periods of reading, instead keeping interest up with excellent voice acting. Unfortunately, while everything in the quests is great, the systems to track quests is astoundingly bad. The quest log book will fail to track about 40% of quests, the system for tracking which notification on the map links to which quest either doesn’t work or doesn’t exist, and there’s no indication of how difficult a quest will be until the player is unable to retreat. These features seem so unfriendly I can’t believe they’re intentional, and since the game was in Early Access for about six months it’s surprising they haven’t been improved.

Combat, or more accurately confrontation, is the last major pillar of Thea 2. The same system is used whether you’re fighting, persuading, or engaging in a spiritual conflict with your enemies. Confrontation is done through a card game system, with each player getting a play area with two rows and between three and eight columns. Over the course of seven rounds, players play cards to the play area to “attack” or can discard cards for indirect abilities such as strengthening cards already in the play area. A card can be played multiple times, but costs extra resources for each time beyond the first time it is played. This results in relatively few cards being played overall so players have to deploy their cards carefully or risk losing characters permanently to bad strategy. At first glance the rules of the card game look overwhelming, but the developers listened to player feedback from the original Thea and have implemented tutorials that fully explain the systems without bogging players down with over-explanation.

Thea 2: The Shattering is definitely not for everyone, but it also might not even be for people who think it is their cup of tea. The game has a lot of excellent features and systems, but, in spite of having 6 months of public development time through the Early Access program, it doesn’t feel complete. For players who can overlook or work through these flaws, Thea 2 is a great time. And at $25 it’s not a rip-off, but potential buyers might want to do some extra research into gameplay videos before deciding to pick it up.

Buy this game on sale

It’s worth playing, just not at the price they’re asking