Lost Eidolons: Veil of the Witch Review Summary

Excellent Blend of Genres: Players highly praise the game's successful fusion of tactical RPG (SRPG) and roguelike elements, often comparing it to Fire Emblem, XCOM, and Slay the Spire. This combination creates a fresh, engaging, and strategically deep gameplay experience that keeps players coming back.

Highly Enjoyable & Addictive: Players find the game incredibly fun, addictive, and satisfying, often losing track of time while playing. The challenging yet balanced difficulty, combined with a rewarding meta-progression system, contributes to a strong desire for continuous play.

Improved Sequel Experience: The game is widely considered a significant improvement over its predecessor, Lost Eidolons, with developers actively incorporating player feedback. It streamlines gameplay, removes unnecessary elements, and enhances core mechanics, offering a fresh yet familiar experience.

Strong Character & Build Variety: The game offers a diverse cast of unique characters, each with distinct playstyles and meaningful upgrade paths. The variety in weapons, skills, artifacts, and character combinations ensures that each run feels fresh and encourages experimentation with different builds.

Appealing Art & Character Design: The game's art style, character designs, and animations receive significant positive feedback. Players find the visuals beautiful, appealing, and a notable improvement, contributing to the overall enjoyment and immersion.

Excessive Grind & Repetitive Gameplay: Players consistently report that the game is overly grindy, requiring extensive repetition of stages and battles for minimal progression. This leads to boredom and a feeling of monotony, especially in the mid-to-late game, and significantly impacts replayability.

Unbalanced & Inconsistent Difficulty: The game's difficulty is perceived as highly inconsistent, being either too hard and grindy at the start or becoming too easy after a few upgrades. This imbalance, coupled with a lack of difficulty options, frustrates players and detracts from the experience.

Weak Story & Lack of Content: The narrative is widely criticized for being boring, shallow, and underdeveloped, especially compared to the previous title. Players feel there's insufficient story content, character depth, and overall game content, leading to a quick loss of interest.

Roguelike Elements Misapplied: The integration of roguelike mechanics is a major point of contention. Many players feel these elements are poorly implemented, making the game feel like a short tactical RPG forcibly stretched into a roguelike, lacking the genre's typical replayability, variety, and 'power fantasy'.

Poor Skill & Progression Systems: The skill system is criticized for having too many useless or plain skills, limited variety, and random assignment, which hinders strategic build planning. Meta-progression is also seen as shallow and unrewarding, making subsequent runs feel less impactful.

Roguelite Tactical RPG Core: The game is fundamentally a turn-based tactical RPG with significant roguelite elements, often compared to Fire Emblem, Darkest Dungeon, and XCOM. This structure involves repeated runs, random elements, and meta-progression, distinguishing it as a spin-off rather than a direct sequel to its predecessor.

Character Progression & Customization: Characters level up during runs, gaining random stat increases and skills, often presented as choices. There's also meta-progression between runs, allowing for permanent upgrades, unlocking new characters, and class promotions. Weapon types dictate skill sets, and a rock-paper-scissors system adds strategic depth to combat.

Variable Run Length & Difficulty: A single run can take anywhere from one to seven hours, depending on player skill and progression. While some find the initial difficulty high, others with tactical RPG experience find it manageable. The game's difficulty can also vary based on skill acquisition and team movement, sometimes requiring grinding for specific boss encounters.

Strategic Path & Party Choices: Players control a five-character party and navigate branching paths on a map, choosing between combat, events, shops, and camps. This allows for strategic decision-making regarding resource management and party development within each run, with options to recruit new characters and form varied team compositions.

Challenging Boss Encounters: The game features three distinct bosses, each requiring different strategies and understanding of mechanics. Initial encounters can be very difficult, often leading to player wipes, which then feed into the roguelite progression loop by encouraging upgrades for subsequent attempts.

General optimization issues: While some players find the game fluid and light, others with basic specs experience forced 30 FPS, high GPU fan noise, and initial unplayability due to crashes. There's also a specific optimization issue noted during a sandworm battle.

Excellent Steam Deck performance: Players consistently report that the game runs flawlessly on the Steam Deck, with no crashes and smooth performance, even consuming less power than comparable titles.

Generally Recommended with Caveats: The game receives a strong general recommendation, especially for fans of specific genres like roguelike, tactical turn-based RPGs, and Fire Emblem-style combat. However, some players suggest waiting for further updates or the full release due to its Early Access status and current incompleteness.

Needs More Content and Variety: Players desire a significant expansion of game content, including more allies, events, battles, boss variants, levels, relics, abilities, and equip upgrades. There's also a call for increased difficulty after successful runs and more diverse enemies and locations.

Anticipation for Full Release: Many players are eagerly awaiting the full release of the game, hoping for story completion, additional content, and overall improvements. Some recommend picking up the game now and waiting, while others prefer to wait entirely until the official launch.

Roguelite Core Gameplay: The game is fundamentally a roguelite-RPG where players undertake runs, gradually level up, and progress through a main story. This core mechanic is a key selling point for fans of the genre, but those who dislike roguelites are advised to proceed with caution.

QoL and Technical Improvements Needed: Players are requesting various quality-of-life fixes and technical improvements, such as addressing screen blacking out, resolution/aspect ratio patches, and the addition of a pause or save function during combat.

Anticipation for Full Release: Many players are eagerly awaiting the full release of the game, expecting more content, story completion, and overall improvements. There's a strong desire for continued development and future updates.

Need for Content Variety: There's a consistent request for more variety across various aspects of the game, such as maps, music, character outfits, weapons, classes, abilities, enemies, and locations. Players also desire more bosses and an endless mode.

Suggestions for Core Mechanics: Players have specific suggestions for improving core gameplay mechanics, including experience systems, weapon upgrades, skill trees, and difficulty options. There's a desire for more strategic depth and varied gameplay.

Comparison to Previous Game: Some players, particularly those familiar with the predecessor, draw comparisons, noting differences in story depth and character permanence. Others haven't played the previous game and cannot compare.

User Interface and Camera: Suggestions include adding convenience features, improving camera controls (zoom, action camera), and providing more detailed character models. These improvements would enhance the overall player experience.