It's very impressive what this game achieves through simplifying and formalizing some of the archetypical RPG gameplay elements, like classes, exploration, monster encounters and looting. Four fundamental classes (knight, ranger, mage, priest) are reduced to several abilities (block damage, hit for additional damage, hit all enemies, heal/revive). Player's party has all of those abilities equally represented, while each enemy party can have a varying amount of creatures of each type with additional abilities. The tactical rules are simplified as well: the defensive unit gets all melee attacks, the ranged unit has limited amount of shots that can ignore defensive unit attacks, the magical unit can hit everyone several times, etc. The exploration is also reduced to choosing what party to attack in a highly densely populated room. Enemy encounters present player with a series of small tactical challenges that may not be even recognized as such from the first glance, until the game becomes more punishing (it certainly took a while for me to understand this). Approaching each of the enemy groups, neatly arranged along the ultra symmetric dungeon floor, player has to decide how he wants to spend his resources, who he wants to attack first, weather he wants to raise shield or not, etc. The fights themselves are just visualizations of the results of player-made decisions. Each challenge's goal is to reduce enemy number to zero by minimum attacks and with minimum damage. These miniature tactical challenges are the core of the gameplay. Simplified looting reinforces this idea: each successful fight grants player with a unit of resource, that he is encouraged to spend immediately in one of the following fights.

The game knows very well whit kind of experience it wants to present a player with, and thus strips away all other peripheral elements, such as space traversal, exploration, character placement and equipment, story, detailed setting etc. Due to this minimizations and formalizations game feels very focused and its core mechanics very polished. But also this makes game's reality feel somewhat counterintuitive and little hard to understand at first: dungeons look more like crowded disco-parties, fights animations look confusing, the interface feels overwhelming, and the tactical challenges goals and challenges are not entirely graspable either due to a poor explanation of each monster’s abilities. The achievement system intrigued me at first, but since I could not have found any in-game use for those cards, it has ultimately left me somewhat disappointed.