Beneath Oresa

Beneath Oresa drops a small cast of heroes into a crumbling, faction-ruled underground city, building card-based decks to fight through its floors in the well-established Slay the Spire tradition. It wears its genre influences openly, and reviewers consistently credit its art direction with distinguishing it from a now-crowded field of similar deckbuilding roguelikes, even as its mechanics draw a more mixed reception.

Art and animation reviewers call a genuine standout

The single most consistent praise in the review base concerns presentation. Reviewers repeatedly describe the game as "beautiful," crediting detailed combat animations and a distinctive visual style with elevating the experience beyond a typical genre entry — praise that appears even in otherwise critical reviews, suggesting it's a genuinely, broadly agreed-upon strength rather than a matter of taste.

Characters and randomization reviewers call underdeveloped

Set against that praise, the game's launch-era character design draws specific, repeated criticism. Reviewers describe the playable heroes as feeling too similar to one another, sharing overlapping card pools and mechanics rather than offering the clearly distinct playstyles genre veterans expect. A related complaint concerns card randomization itself: several detailed reviews describe runs where their intended build never materializes because the game simply doesn't offer the right cards at the right time, a complaint framed explicitly against Slay the Spire's more carefully tuned randomization as the genre's benchmark.

A price complaint tied to launch-era content

Several reviewers explicitly frame their criticism around value rather than any single broken system, arguing the asking price didn't match the amount of distinct content available at launch relative to comparable deckbuilders. That's a distinct complaint from the mechanical criticisms above — not that any one system is broken, but that the overall package felt thinner than its price implied when it first released.

A confirmed fix for a specific clarity complaint

This review's research confirms the developer directly addressed one specific, repeated complaint: several early reviews describe cards referencing status effects or symbols with no explanation available anywhere in the game, including in tooltips. A dedicated update roughly a year after the full release explicitly added "a lot of missing tooltips" alongside other clarity improvements — a clean, confirmed fix for a complaint distinct from the broader variety and randomization criticisms, which this review's research did not find a comparably direct fix for. Notably, no confirmed option to skip or reject offered cards was found, despite that being a specific, repeated request tied to the randomization complaint above.

What the achievement data confirms about difficulty

Global achievement data shows a genuinely steep difficulty curve: only 28.9% of the playerbase has completed even a full run at the easiest of five difficulty tiers, falling to 16.0% at the second tier and just 5.1% at the fifth. That's a meaningfully steeper attrition rate than many deckbuilder roguelikes in this lane, and it lends real weight to reviewer complaints about randomization and balance rather than suggesting those complaints come from an unusually vocal minority.

Sustained support well beyond a typical launch window

This review's research confirms Beneath Oresa received genuinely extensive post-launch investment: frequent balance patches continued through 2024 and into early 2025, roughly a year and a half after the September 2023 full release, addressing specific card interactions, difficulty tuning, and stability issues in a steady, numbered cadence. That's a real, sustained commitment distinct from a studio shipping once and moving on, even where certain specific complaints — like the request for a card-skip option — don't appear to have been directly answered within that support window.

A defense some reviewers make against the difficulty complaints

Not every reviewer treats the game's difficulty as a design flaw. Several explicitly push back against what they characterize as review-bombing driven by frustration with a genuinely hard game rather than a broken one, drawing a comparison to similarly-received titles in the same period and arguing that difficulty itself shouldn't be conflated with poor design. That's a meaningful counter-argument worth weighing against the achievement data above: a steep completion curve is consistent with both "the game is unfairly balanced" and "the game is legitimately hard but fair," and reviewers are genuinely split on which explanation fits their own experience.

A faction system with real long-term depth

Beyond the core complaints, the game's achievement list itself reveals a level of built-in longevity some reviewers may undersell: dozens of achievements track specific hero-and-faction combinations completed together, suggesting a deliberately designed metagame around discovering which pairings work well rather than a single "solved" optimal strategy. Reviewers who engage with that structure directly, rather than judging the game purely on its first few runs, describe a slower-burning sense of discovery that the launch-era variety complaints don't fully capture.

How it compares within its own genre

Reviewers who've played widely across the deckbuilder-roguelike space consistently place Beneath Oresa below Slay the Spire itself on mechanical depth and randomization tuning, but several are careful to note that's a genuinely high bar — the genre's clearest touchstone rather than a typical baseline. Measured against the broader wave of similar titles that followed in Slay the Spire's wake, rather than against the genre's single best-regarded entry, reviewers describe Beneath Oresa as a competent, above-average example distinguished primarily by its art direction, even where its card design and character variety trail the format's strongest work.

Where it lands

Beneath Oresa earns its Mostly Positive reception through genuinely striking art and animation work that reviewers consistently single out as a standout even among a crowded genre, while its Mostly Positive rather than higher standing reflects real, specific complaints about character variety, randomization tuning, and launch-era value that this review's research confirms are widely shared. The developer's sustained, responsive post-launch support — including a direct, confirmed fix for the game's tooltip clarity problem — is a genuine point in its favor, even where it hasn't closed every gap reviewers have raised. For deckbuilder fans specifically drawn to its presentation, this remains a worthwhile, if imperfect, pickup.