Order Automatica

Cute little auto-battler that will kill an hour or two before/after work! There seems to be about ten hours of gameplay on average, give or take. I like the spooky atmosphere, and the pixel art has an uncanny charm that makes it worthy of a horror genre tag. The music is punchy and pleasing to the ear. I imagine it's quite difficult to make a puzzle game that manages to be complex despite its simplicity; Order Automatica hits a homerun. You work with a 3x3 grid with a limited amount of characters with different abilities. It's a neat little challenge to figure out how to get the most out of your boxes. 'Deckbuilder' isn't necessarily the word I'd use to describe the way you curate your grid, but I certainly can't think of a more suitable descriptor. There are a couple of difficulty spikes that were slightly intimidating at first, but a couple more runs ironed out the new information; they're fair and kept the game from feeling too easy halfway through. Fun indie title worth five bucks and a few hours of your time, especially if you like horror imagery somewhat reminiscent of Fear & Hunger.

Autobattlers are fine, love watching numbers go up, getting big, getting broken, but they aren’t a favorite of mines. Now arranging things in a grind, that tickles my brain. Even more so when not just positioning, but the order matters and I think it works really well here. The small scale of the grind keeps runs quick (unless you find something broken, but more on that in a second), and prevents the player from getting too overwhelmed with mathing things out, if they even want to go through the trouble. On first blush it seems like a good system. The small scale of the game was another point of attraction for me. I don’t want long games, for them to try and take over my life. I’m fine with getting all the fun out of the game quickly, especially at this price point. However I quickly found THE STRAT https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3807898735 , one where I could basically go infinite in buffing my side before a battle even starts. It became the only avenue to consistently win as well, as other synergies are nowhere near as strong and the way the game handles difficulty hurts those the most. There is no easy way to do a summon build for example, when the game throws rocks and locks at you, gumming up your board before you even get to summon. That’s why the game gets the thumbs down from me, the more I played it the more I saw the one true way to play, and even in its small scale that poor balance is a dealbreaker for me. 2/5 If you do ignore everything else I said I will say the little extra tease for getting 100% is cute.