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Basic Stuff

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While there's a pretty unique combat system, the name of the game is quests which have branching paths (hence the game name) and affect the world.

Very very open world. Nothing is blocked to you, though quests that involve killing something(s) might be outside the range of what you can do until you level up.

There probably isn't a main quest, it's just a ton of side quests.

In a similar vein, the world is pretty large.

Combat System

The combat system is a spellsword kind of thing -- you can both wield weapons and do magic. The magic system is pretty complicated and elaborate but more powerful (and ranged) than the weapon system, though that has its own perks.

Blueprints

The most unique part of this system is that you build your own weapons, armor and spells.

All three of these have a skill level -- weapons and magic go up as you use them, while armor goes up as you get hit.

You can then build a weapon according to the amount of weapon points you have available. Adding more power to it obviously makes it go up, increasing the chance it successfully hits, etc.

There are a variety of effects that can be attached to weapons as well that cost varying (but handcrafted) amounts of WP. This requires exploring to find 3 fragments of the appropriate blueprint. Blueprint fragments are scattered around the world procedurally. They can also have their locations revealed with Oracle Stones, but those are nonrenewable consumables, so use them wisely.

The magic system works similar. The magic system *itself* sure doesn't, but you're still making your own spells according to your MP. Same deal with the armor system.

All of this tinkering is done at a Tinker. There's one in each town, and there are a lot of towns.

Magic System: Elements

Magic attacks use the Shatterloop Six.

Every time you use, say, a fire-1 spell, one point of fire gets added to the environment. Use a fire-2 spell and it goes up by 2. Attacking elements will reduce a point, so for example a water-1 spell will remove a single point of fire or earth, while an earth-2 spell will remove 2 points of fire, fire+earth, or 2 points of earth. This targets the beginning of the stack first.

If you reach 5 points of a single element, it gets removed and you summon an elemental of that element. This is *bad* -- they're weak to attacking elements but they deal a lot of damage and take a turn in addition to other enemy turns.

Some environments will have their own starting points -- it'll never be 5 but it can complicate things. Some enemies can also make these elemental points go up, though that's really something only the harder ones do.

Enemies have elemental weaknesses sometimes.

Magic System: Celestials

Rather than Mana, you have three Celestials -- sol, lune and sanguine. Each of these can be between -100 and 100.

Spells will require some celestial setting or some combination in order to use them. More powerful spells require more specific settings.

There are other types of spells that alter the celestials, however they add elemental points. Some require elemental point configurations instead. Some will alter elemental points but fuck with the celestials, and so on.

Tinker: Conditions

Conditions can be attached to weapons, weapon properties, weapon effects, spells, armor, etc. These tie into elemental points and celestials. You need the appropriate blueprint for each type and can only use each one once across the entirety of weapons/armor, so use them wisely. They aren't consumable, I just mean that your loadout can only have one of each type.

This obviously makes using whatever you're using harder, but it makes WP/MP/AP go down. If you have a good magic system going you can make some pretty busted weapons and armor.

Actual Magic System

The actual magic system is a kind of deckbuilder. You can add as many cards as you like, but you do have MP limits, which are attached to each spell in question.

There are a few types of spell cards:

Attacks -- the elemental attacks.

Celestial -- alter the celestials in some way. There's a lot of maneuvering (average two celestials, swap them, etc) as well as random point increment and decrements, etc. More powerful ones cost more MP and you can get around them by attaching conditions.

Enchantments -- alter various things permanently for each battle. Increased hand size, hard caps on a celestial, increased spear damage, whatever.

Elemental -- has various effects on elementals like cloning slot 1 to everything else, randomizing the existing ones, clearing all of them, etc. Obviously more powerful ones cost either more MP or conditions.

Meta -- Does stuff with the deck mechanic itself -- draw more cards, card search, pull in shit from the discard pile, look at the top of the deck, whatever.

Deck Mechanics

You have a hand size of 5 (might go up or down, whatever) and a maximum hand size of 5. Every turn you draw a card and have to discard down to your maximum at the end.

The deck is shuffled prior to each battle and you don't know the order of the cards in it from the outset.

When your deck runs out of cards, the discard pile is shuffled and becomes a new deck.

If you don't want to use magic, you can close the tab -- you won't draw cards so you won't have to discard.

Blueprints

Like magic and armor, you unlock new card types via blueprints. I see kind of an excessive amount of potential spells so these might be full items rather than pieces.

Weapon Types

You can only have one weapon at a time -- effects and type included.

There are three types:

Axe -- does the most damage out of the gate.

Sword -- allows you to attack multiple enemies at once.

Spear -- allows you to attack at range (though a ranged attack is weaker).

Enemies move around different ranges, so you either need to wait for them to come into range, use something in the environment to close the gap, have a spear, or just use magic.

Quests

As mentioned, the Quests are the real meat of the game. The combat system is just there to make the quests more interesting.

Quests don't reward you with anything and there's no currency whatsoever. However, there's branching dialogue and the choices you make have a huge impact on the game environment.

Quests are pretty opaque -- if it's a fetch quest they'll tell you to go somewhere and do something or pick up an item but they don't tell you how to get there and the game world is pretty large. You get around that by asking around.

Asking around will also tell you more about some NPC or whatever from various perspectives so you can make a more informed choice -- some are still quite hard to predict though.

Pacifism

Instead of killing monsters, you can practice pacifism -- this is a bit harder to do though.

Essentially, you have to learn the language of a sentient creature or learn the godlang of an unsentient one. Automatons can't be reasoned with so you will still need to "kill" them.

To do that you have to find the right Altar, set it to the right setting (each alter represents a few creatures and they all default to blank), find the secret location and go in through a passageway that only appears when that altar setting is set.

When you know a language or godlang and you encounter the appropriate creature, you can talk with them rather than kill them. But beware -- make the right choice and they'll leave peacefully, but make the wrong choice and they'll affect the world negatively on their way out.