Forgotten Mines - Just One More Turn Energy

Forgotten Mines' tutorial is 2 static screens filled with text. At first it's overwhelming - there's so much to take in if you try and drink it down before starting to play. On the other hand, it's emblematic of the game itself; there's so much depth for you to explore right on the surface but you can engage with it at your own pace;, it doesn't waste your time with unnecessary tutorialization, trusting you to figure it out; and best of all, you can simply ignore it by just playing around with the systems to work it out as you go.

In very Into The Breach vibes, everything is paired back to a smaller, more manageable play space. A simple 8x8 grid presents a battlefield for your handful of heroes to move around on. Action points determine the amount of movement, attacks and skills you can use in a turn. As a tactics roguelite, you will have multiple levels per dungeon, with multiple dungeon biomes to conquer sequentially. All stuff you've heard before.

The key is in the execution, which is pulled off superbly here. Level and run times are tuned just right, with enough time to build up a squad while not too long to feel disheartened at your inevitable defeat. Units begin simple, but with gear, levelling upgrades and new skills, build variety is expansive. There's a large number of back-at-base upgrades to unlock for building overall progression and smoothing that knowledge / power curve. While some of the base upgrades such as "increased slash damage" are pretty boring, the wealth of classes to try out and the amulets you can equip take theory crafting the perfect team to a whole other level.

It's been said a million times, but this genre hangs on it's “just one more turn... just one more run” hooks. Forgotten Mines has this in spades. every time I picked this up to play, I was sucked in and immediately lost hours.

Which leads me to the only reason I did end up putting the game down - the bugs. Unfortunately, at least when it comes to using a controller / steam deck, there is still some work to be done to get some issues resolved. There were menu screens where navigation controls just would not work at all half the time, but the other half be fine. When at the item shop at various points through a run, equipping items would lead to them duplicating in item slots and being sold for 3x the price - if the game didn't crash altogether. Worst of all, twice after the game crashed in my 4 hours of play, booting the game back up and attempting to load back into a run was met with a corrupt save, where not only was I not able to continue the run, I could not even start a new one, meaning I had to wipe my entire save and start the meta progression over from scratch. 

I'm not gonna lie, while the duplication bug gave me free reign to advance much further earlier than I expected, the other bugs have been killer. It doesn't seem like many others are encountering the same issues though, so maybe I'm just unlucky there. Regardless, bugs can be fixed, and given the young (solo!) dev's clear talent, I'm confident these issues will get resolved with time.

While I'll be putting it down for the moment, I'll be eager to keep an eye on patch notes moving forward in the hope that the worst of it gets smoothed out. Because despite the dramas, the bones of this turn based roguelite are excellent, and all I want to do is play more. The genre can be a fickle one to break into, but Forgotten Mines is easily an instant classic of the genre.