Aeon Trespass Odyssey

Cycle 1 took me six months to complete, playing roughly one session per week. For cycle 2 I got into it more (mainly because I had no PC game I wanted to play) so I played one session most days. It took just over two months from start to finish.

Let’s see if I can play cycle 3 in under two months and finish the three released cycles in 2023 like I set out to do at the start of the year.

Pros

• I’m really enjoying the complexity of the story. It’s well executed with lots of interlocking parts.
• The way your accomplishments though the campaign in terms of story development feed in to the final battle is great. You feel really well rewarded for doing all the “side quests”.
• Progression in terms of unlocking technologies, abilities and gear also feels rewarding.
• This cycle in particular keeps offering you the choice between obvious gains at a cost of your humanity, versus help people out but your cause suffers. I chose the latter option every time but was then rewarded in the end by having powerful allies to help me out.
• A portion of this cycle has a really cool “flee your pursuers” phase that lasts about 10 game turns. It was different and tense. I really enjoyed it.

Cons

• You get hit with events outside your control which cause you to loose the cycle (loss of crew, damage to your ship, Titans being killed outside battle, amassing too much fate, etc). The game assumes you’ll loose a cycle several times and just restart. I’m not restarting a ~80 hour cycle. I just ended up ignoring these loss conditions.
• This cycle has a humanity mechanic but it never explains it. I just started to be told an event had caused me to loose one point of humanity, so I guessed I started at zero and counted down. Near the end there are some events that check your score and this confirmed I got it right. Oddly at the very end you can unlock an ending if you have positive humanity. That would be out of your control as there are loads of events that reduce it but only the occasional random event (i.e. critical hits on certain locations) that increase it. I ended on -10 and I avoided every loss of humanity where I could.
• I find many battles are quite static and don’t interact with the terrain much. It tends to just end up with my Titans surrounding the Primordial and pummelling them. Sometimes they knock me back and I have to spend a turn running back. Some are dynamic, but less than half. Not sure if it’s me not doing all the rules correctly or by design.