Awaking as a deity with powers still dormant, the player's role in Thea: The Awakening is to guide and empower a helpless handful of villagers through an era in which an incredible force of darkness has engulfed the land and hordes of evil creatures threaten humanity with extinction. Mixing turn-based strategy with survival RPG and elements of "choose your own adventure" gamebooks, Thea is not your typical hex-based, board game inspired strategy RPG or 4x game as you might be inclined to think. On the other side of a small learning curve lies a highly-rewarding, engrossing mythical adventure.

Before you begin, you'll want to customize the difficulty using the large array of modifiable settings such as combat difficulty, encounter rate and much more. New players will want to slide the settings towards easy or novice and set the world size to small. A larger world means farther to travel to gather resources and an increased number of enemy encounters, both of which are randomly occurring and randomly positioned on the map. Locations and timings of sidequests are also procedurally-generated, so every game of Thea will be different. Multiple playthroughs are encouraged to see all the sidequests and unlock new deities or perks for your chosen god, which carry over.

The game begins with an optional tutorial explaining the ins and outs of the core concepts. Thereafter lies the learning curve that may initially put off new players. However, deeply rewarding gameplay immediately proceeds this small challenge, which disappears once you familiarize yourself with some core aspects of the user interface: chiefly how to produce food and fuel and send out expeditions with packed lunches. The user interface is nicely presented and very helpful (and snazzy looking) explanations drop down when you hover over any stat or icon. Everything else should be quickly picked up by most and so the gates to high adventure are soon to open. Mists surround all but the close proximity of your village, so have the workers harvest food and fuel and select a group of villagers for your first expedition into the unknown.

As you venture forth, you never know who or what you will encounter as your visibility of the map is only a few squares ahead of your position. Facing off against spiders and the undead will introduce you to the combat system, which is actually simpler than you might think. Your merry band of deity in training and ragatg mix of villagers will be randomly placed onto the offensive or defensive positions of a board, in the form of cards. This categorization will for the most part determine who will be attacking and who will be buffing/debuffing. After each side's offensive character cards have been placed and defensive cards utilized, the automatic combat phase begins and each character randomly attacks those to their left and/or right. It's a fun, refreshing way to clobber the heads of your enemies with that lovely stone hammer you've been itching to use ever since you looted it from those slavers. All combat situations can be auto-resolved, which is one of the many ways in which Thea let's the player choose how they want to experience the game.

The main story arc is a nicely voice-acted fantasy tale of a god on a quest to regain their powers and support a land in danger from an evil, pervasive force known as The Darkness. The best storylines for me were the numerous side quests and abundant encounters with strange characters and mysterious beings. Rather than being a collection of fleeting, inconsequential subplots, many will span multiple locations, rendezvous points and alternate conclusions based on your course of action. For example, you may come across a beautiful woman who has lost her children. Pointing out where they were last seen, you travel to a new area and meet an intimidating bunch of orcs who have enslaved the kids. Elsewhere, you might also meet a dwarf smith who is infatuated with the woman and promises an attractive bundle of weapons and armor as a reward for arranging a meet-up. Some of these people are not what they seem and if your social skill stat allows it, you can learn the truths and open up new avenues to satisfy all three parties and maximize your loot and rewards. All of these little tales are well-written and captivating and although the when and where (or if) they appear are random, they never feel like they distract from the overarching storyline. A lighthearted vein runs through the game; from item descriptions and dialogue but most evidently in the humorous or sarcastic responses available to you while conversing. Almost all events can be concluded by non-aggressive means if your team has the appropriate skills. Whether won by sword, skill or speech, experience and research points are rewarded.

All is not quiet back at the village. Even if you don't wander far; enemies, traders and events will make their way to your neck of the woods. Building pastures and cultivating crops will attract new people or children to your village, the latter of whom you can shape into warriors, workers, gatherers or a multitude of specialized or rare classes later on. Resource management is not stressful in Thea, unless you're playing on a super-hard difficulty setting. It essentially boils down to making sure your town is producing enough food and fuel and your expeditions(s) have an ample supply of both to last them for the round trip back to base. If you feel like it, you can send villagers out to mine or gather less common resources outside of town, but remember to bring a fighter or two with them because they can be attacked. Almost everything you do rewards you with experience to build up every person's skill levels and research points to use towards unlocking new buildings and craftable equipment.

Every encounter and event is accompanied by beautiful, painterly artwork with vibrant, deep colors. There really ought to be an artbook of some kind available to admire all of the eye candy in one consolidated format. The high-quality soundtrack is quietly epic, never obtrusive and fits the fantasy theme very well. I can wholeheartedly recommend Thea: The Awakening and would strongly encourage anyone wearily contemplating the management and/or strategy elements to just go for it. Thea let's you choose how you play the game, so those aspects can have a role that's secondary to the excellent adventuring and storytelling, if you wish. The small learning curve is well worth hurdling over and will quickly dissipate to reveal one of the most rewarding experiences any fantasy or RPG fan is sure to have on PC.