Aeon Trespass Odyssey

This morning I finished Cycle 1! I played the tutorial on 7th January, so cycle 1 took be almost seven full calendar months to complete. I settled into a routine where a game sessions was either a combat or the various exploration and story steps in between. Either session type took one and a half to two hours, and I usually got one session in per week. I’d guess I had about 28 sessions to play cycle 1 (i.e. about 50 hours).

Overall I’ve really enjoyed it. The story is intriguing and the combat mechanics are solid.

Some observations:

• Technically I lost several times over, but with the level of time commitment required I just kept playing. I should have lost due to all my crew dyeing, but I missed a technology which meant I didn’t progress properly for about 30 turns. Had that not happened I should have unlocked a technology allowing me to recruit crew.
• The cycle has an 80 turn limit and the map has 80 cards to explore (you explore one per turn at best). However, some areas or the map are dead ends, forcing you to backtrack, and the story has you go back and forth a bit. It is therefore impossible to explore the whole map. You can see above I never fully explored the eastern edge. But I didn’t realise this since I was only revealing one tile a time (I didn’t lay them out all face down at the start). I wasted about 20 to 30 turns leisurely exploring the map, as is my wont in RPG’s and games in general. In the end this meant I needed 83 turns to finish the game. Again I wasn’t going to restart when I hit turn 81 knowing I was so close to completion.
• I had frequent references to special characters. E.g. if you have the Minoan Guide you can do this… Not once did I encounter an option to recruit either of these special characters. I can only assume I missed it right at the start of the campaign.
• The game contains a cypher for the numbers 0-9. Occasionally you are given one, and once you have enough you can decipher some three or four digit codes to reveal some secrets. Even with the amount of time I put in I only unlocked about half the digits (one was given to me twice with conflicting information) and I never once unlocked a code. I don’t know if I was just unlucky or maybe they develop more in future cycles.
• As your Argonauts develop they unlock memories and gain powerful abilities. The last unlock usually looks really powerful but it’s a trick. In every case I encountered (about four times) when you finally reach that point you are given the choice to retire the Argonaut or suffer a permanent penalty to them. You don’t actually unlock the final ability. The first time I assumed it was a quirk of the particular track, but they all ended up more or less the same. It felt like I was cheated a bit.

I’ll take a short break while I paint all the models for cycle 2 then I’ll try to finish the next one a bit quicker.