Dissimilar

Dissimilar drops its protagonist, Amelia, inside a sprawling, ancestral castle in search of two amulets hidden somewhere in its vaults, and quickly reveals itself as something stranger and more layered than a straightforward escape-room adventure. Developed and self-published by the small French studio Opal Grave Games, it launched as a full, non-Early-Access release on 9 December 2025. Steam's audience calls it Positive at 25 of 28 reviews, and reading across that review corpus turns up an unusually consistent picture: a small but devoted audience captivated by the game's art, atmosphere and mystery, with a real, recurring minority pushing back specifically on how its combat handles failure.

A castle worth getting lost in

The clearest throughline across the review corpus is enthusiasm for the game's central conceit -- exploring a huge, interconnected castle by finding keys, solving light puzzles, and gradually unlocking new areas, all while piecing together a science-fiction mystery involving artificial intelligence, hidden technology and a family secret. Reviewers repeatedly praise the game's fully hand-drawn art style, several specifically noting the melancholy, painterly quality of its visuals, and its music and sound design draw equally consistent praise, more than one reviewer calling the soundtrack surprisingly non-repetitive given how much time is spent in the castle's halls. A "mental palace" system that lets players revisit information they've already gathered is specifically credited by more than one reviewer for keeping the mystery legible across a long adventure, avoiding the classic escape-room problem of forgetting which door a given key was supposed to open.

Puzzle-like combat that some find rewarding, others tedious

Combat is where the review corpus splits most clearly, even while remaining broadly positive overall. Encounters pit Amelia -- who serves a largely support role, printing and directing disposable robot allies rather than fighting directly -- against enemies with entirely deterministic attack patterns, meaning every fight is, in principle, a solvable puzzle once a player learns how each enemy behaves. Reviewers who enjoy this structure describe it in explicitly puzzle-game terms, several drawing direct comparisons to Into the Breach's readable, pattern-based combat, and praising how character improvement comes entirely through exploration and unlocked abilities rather than a traditional experience-point grind. But a real, recurring share of the same review corpus describes the flip side of that determinism as a genuine trial-and-error slog: since losing a fight typically means retreating to the nearest health-restoring terminal, several reviewers say a difficult encounter can force a long, repetitive backtrack before another attempt is even possible, with one negative review explicitly calling the structure "a mechanic to prolong the playtime" rather than a meaningful design choice. Multiple reviews note that a post-launch "retry" feature has eased, though not eliminated, that friction, letting players reattempt a lost fight more quickly than the original release allowed.

A story reviewers call the game's biggest strength

Even reviewers who flag combat fatigue are near-unanimous in praising the writing underneath it. The unfolding mystery -- involving Amelia's family, an ambiguous virtual-reality framing for the castle's battles, and questions about what's real within the story's world -- is repeatedly described as genuinely compelling and well-paced, with several reviewers specifically praising how thoroughly the ending follows through on themes set up much earlier. One detailed review, having finished the full campaign, calls the game "absolutely phenomenal," writing that it "follows through on its themes and story beats extremely thoroughly, both mentally and emotionally," while another reviewer bluntly states it's the best game released by a French studio in its launch year. An adjustable difficulty setting, including a dedicated story mode, is repeatedly credited by reviewers for letting players who bounce off the tactical combat still experience the narrative in full.

A distinct roster with limited squad size

A specific structural choice draws its own attention across positive reviews: at any given moment Amelia can only field up to three printed robot allies at once, and the game deliberately prevents fielding two copies of the same unit type simultaneously. Losing an ally in battle means either reprinting it from scratch, stripped of whatever buffs or debuffs it had accumulated, or swapping in a different unit entirely, both options costing a slice of Amelia's own limited health pool. Several reviewers single this system out as the source of most of the game's tactical texture, since it forces constant, meaningful decisions about which unit types to commit to a given fight rather than simply deploying a maximal roster, and more than one review specifically praises how the variety of special abilities unlocked across the campaign supports genuinely different squad-building approaches to the same encounter. That said, the same system underpins the health-cost complaints raised elsewhere in the review corpus, since every reprint or swap draws directly from the same resource pool that also gates progress through the castle's locked doors, tying combat performance and exploration progress together more tightly than a typical tactics game.

What the achievement curve suggests

Global achievement data offers a useful independent check on how the game's structure plays out in practice. Early milestone achievements sit at a healthy 45.0% and 34.4% of all owners, but the figures fall away steadily with each subsequent tier -- 22.6%, 22.0%, 20.8%, 19.9% -- down to just 9.0% for the final major milestone tracked. That's a gradual, steady decline rather than a sudden cliff, broadly consistent with a game whose reviewers describe an accessible, story-forward start that gradually filters out players as its harder, optional Elite-tier encounters and longer completionist goals kick in, rather than pointing to any single dramatic difficulty spike.

Final verdict

Dissimilar is a small, distinctive tactical RPG that earns some of the most enthusiastic praise in this review corpus for its hand-drawn art, atmospheric sci-fi mystery and puzzle-like combat design -- reviewers repeatedly describe it as a hidden gem deserving of a much larger audience than it's currently found. Its combat's trial-and-error structure and health-station backtracking are real, recurring friction points for a meaningful minority of players, even after a post-launch retry feature eased some of that tedium, but for anyone drawn to narrative-first tactics games with a genuine mystery at their core, this is an easy recommendation. Worth trying the demo first if repeated failed attempts at deterministic puzzle-fights sound more frustrating than rewarding.