Aeon Trespass: Odyssey (ATO) by Lawnor

I finished Cycle 5 back in August.  I thought I’d made a final post ages ago, but apparently not.  I’m doing a long delayed update on all my projects, so lets put some final thoughts up here, based on what little I can still remember.  I can’t talk specifics, but I can talk in terms of the thoughts and feelings it left me with.

The game was enjoyable, but too damn hard.  I know some people like it as it is, but it’s too difficult, and too much like hard work sometimes.  I was playing solo and with 3 other brains to hand it would hopefully be more manageable, but it could definitely use an overhaul in terms of both difficulty and usability/accessibility.  If I wanted to look up a rule in Cycle 5 and I wasn’t sure when it was introduced I had to check through 6 books one at a time to find it because there was no common reference.  Even then, it could be a rule introduced in a story chapter and if I did not write down clearly the page and chapter number I was never going to find that rule ever again.  There was no overall symbol guide either.  They’d show you symbols you’d never seen before and instead of having a guide saying you’ll learn what it means when the time is right, you’re left wondering if they’ve told you already and you just don’t remember.

The rules feel like they’ve seen people min/max and find unexpected combos that break other games and they’ve over corrected to prevent this.  Would it really hurt to let me wear both a cloak and some armour at the same time?  Too many of those items feel like they could be a little more powerful and still be fine.  Often I’d unlock a secret item, or the endgame craftable and stare at it for a few minutes and never use it because it didn’t do what I needed to survive.

The fact that it takes 9 days (For some its as long as 40 days of an 80 day cycle) to replace a dead titan (some share a common cooldown, some have different cooldowns, but there’s a new fight every 5ish days means that once you start losing your good titans you’re more likely to keep losing fights and more titans.  This made losing titans feel so much harsher than it would have if they could be replaced by just paying a cost and maybe not having them available in the next day or two, if you triggered a story based fight or an Adversary caught up with your ship.

They say it’s OK if you lose against a monster as it has a “fail forward” mechanic.  They say this because you still get to keep the resources you’ve earned from the Hit Location cards you defeated.  There’s already not enough resources to build everything you need.  The game wants you to experiment with new gear options you already can’t afford to waste resources on if they don’t work out, and now they want you to keep going with less resources, meaning you won’t be able to afford to upgrade your gear.  As I’ve just said, losing titans means you’re more likely to keep losing more fights because you’ll be stuck using sub optimal titans.  Now you’ll not even be able to make the gear they expect you to have either.  Losing a few fights will lose you the campaign and it’ll take many sessions for that to work itself out.  There’s no catch up mechanic.  There’s no buffer zone of extra resources if you’re doing well.

The fights are too hard and too harsh, and the consequences of loss are too high.  If they’d picked one or the other, or tried for a middle ground it might have been fine.  Winning a fight with 3 dead titans and your last man on his last legs sound epic, but knowing you’ll never get those titans back until near the end of the campaign, if at all means you won the fight but lost the war.  It’s far too easy for a Titan to just die instantly with no way to stop it.  I had a titan take a small wound in the primordials initial action before I was allowed to make any choices.  He drew the right cards to kill him instantly.  It just sucks, and it feels bad because the cards were shuffled before the game began so his outcome was decided then.  It just took a while to manifest.  the special mechanics on the monsters is usually interesting and would be fun, but they’re usually overtuned and too unforgiving, especially for your first learning fight.  They could often use a little more ramp up time so you can figure out how to deal with them.

The game wants you to fail.  It’s clearly taken a good look at Kingdom Death and seen people like it’s harshness.  It’s then ramped it up and not included KDMs ability to build characters that can rise up to meet it.  In terms of fights, each cycle of ATO is about the same length as a whole campaign of KDM.  however, each cycle takes about twice as long to play due to all the extra elements.  If you lose a campaign of KDM, it’s disappointing, but you’ve lost a few weekends, maybe a few months of weekends.  If you wipe during Cycle 5 and have to start back at the beginning of Cycle 1, you’ve lost maybe a year, and who’s got the lifespan for that?  Officially, if you wipe and restart a cycle you’re supposed to randomly pick all the outcomes from past cycles and just go with it.  They spent years building this story centered game, and now they want you to not care about it and just randomly select what happened?  Respect your own work, and respect the time of your players.

I know I have moaned a lot throughout this whole project, and with good reason, but I did enjoy the game.  It is a good game, it’s just packaged with a lot of frustration.  It could easily be a great game, and a 2nd edition could make that happen.  It needs a combined index, keyword guide, and symbol guide, even if it is covered in spoiler warnings.  It also needs difficulty settings.  The difficulty is currently set to Nightmare, which some people love.  However, if you don’t like to suffer, it could use an easier setting.  One that poses challenges, and bad choices and a run of bad luck can still cost you the campaign, but where the expectation is that a sensible player making sensible choices can still expect to get to the end and have fun.  A heroic mode for people who just want to beat up monsters and play with their cool toys might be nice too.

I backed the sequel (12 Sins of Herakles) when it hit kickstarter so I hope they implement some of this in that, and don’t just assume what they did was perfect for everyone first try.  I might not have backed 12 Sins if I’d played all the way through, but the announced the KS before the first wave had shipped, and it went live when I’d only had enough time to get the basics painted and get a few games of C1 played.  I was not given enough time to get the full experience.  It looked good and had a lot or promise.  It still does.  I just now also feel the weight of the frustrations and difficulty.

I didn’t even want to start playing it until the 2nd wave had arrived.  I wanted all the content in front of me so I could play through without break.  Instead, because of the 12 Sins KS, I ended up having to start it years ago.  Onwards Odyssey is a module containing 2 mini cycles, 1 between cycle and, and one between cycle 3.  I had to play from a PDF copy of that because it got delayed until the second wave.  The follow up for between later chapters (Skyward Odyssey) is still yet to ship and I’ve finished the game already.  I cannot play the final final chapter until that arrives, and I’ve already missed out on 2 of those chapters.  The game is in limbo until then.  Lets hope I can remember how to play buy then.  I’m unlikely to every play this again, without some major balance fixes, so I guess Skywards Odyssey was a waste of money.  I bought a few extra titans that are supposed to work in both games.  I couldn’t use them either as they got delayed until 12 Sins ships.

Cycle 5 specific gripes

The language puzzle.  I hated it.  I couldn’t even look at it.  It was just a collection of swirls with no indication of what constituted a “letter”.  There was just nothing there my eyes or brain could latch on to.  I have no idea how anyone was expected to solve it.  I hated it.  Then they hid a major unlock behind it which I only found out about because I went looking for it.  It’s not essential for the game, but it’s a big deal.  Especially after they sold us an extra product and this was the only way to add it to the game and the shop page really did not begin to make that clear.

Early on, I triggered a Siren appearing on my map.  There’s rules for what to do with them in a fight.  You can also remove them form the map if your ship passes over them.  They create problems until they’re removed.  I still have no idea how you get them to appear in a fight.  I couldn’t find that rule and i don’t recall ever seeing a trigger.

So anwyay.  It’s been 6+ months since I finished the game, and I’m still waiting for the actual final end to arrive in the same box as the sequel.  I look forward to actually finishing this.  I won’t start 12 sins until I know I have the whole thing in my house.

I did enjoy the game.  It is worth playing.  Go in with your eyes open.  Split the load with other players, where available.  Be ready to house rule everything to match your desired difficulty level, if/when it becomes too much.

When 12 sins arrives I will play it and I hope to enjoy it.  I’ll play it as written to begin with, but if it starts to look like it’s just as harsh, I’ll bring in my old house rules, and probably add more to focus more on making it fun rather than challenging.  I hope that they have learned, and at least realise they have something to learn and didn’t make a game that met all their backers needs.

Moaning and reviews over.  At least until I think of more points and come back and edit this.  Here’s some pics of stuff painted and put back in the box, to make it easier for me and other people to remember where everything goes, next time it all comes out.

Oh, and here’s my overall session count.  Each session was 1 fight and all connected voyage phase stuff, which could last from 2-3 hours, to a whole day or longer.  I tried the Mnestis Theatre during Cycle 2, but quickly learned that even when cheating, it was too hard for me.  Do it long enough to unlock the Titan, then walk away if you don’t enjoy banging your head repeatedly in to a brick wall.  Its basically a separate game anyway.

C1: 25+?
C2: 32
C3: 30
C4: 25
C5: 25

For those who are curious, here’s how big it is on a shelf.  The 3 white boxes are the game and the Godforms box.  The red box is my “saved game”.  All the cards, character sheets, technologies, gears etc I’ve unlocked or bought or built, all organised in a way that will hopefully let me restore my game once Skyward Odyssey arrives.  This worked between C3 and C4.