How can one game make me feel so powerful and so weak at the same time?

Path of Achra is the most pure distillation of what makes ARPGs and roguelikes great. It offers a near infinite set of starting possibilities with the culture-class-god choice, magnified by a truly staggering set of powers and prestige classes. Gameplay is very simple, with only a few possible actions available on any given player turn (stand still, move, attack, or one of three prayers), but it belies a truly staggering set of powers, conditions, and associated triggers that can make or break a game run.

Initial runs allow you to learn basic mechanics and trigger conditions, but as the player amasses victories the difficulty increases to require more attuned combinations of powers and classes/cultures/gods to surmount the increased challenge. This increasing difficulty, however, reveals Path of Achra's greatest strength. In most ARPGs, increasing challenges forces players into an ever narrower set of "meta" builds, restricting player freedom and the space of interesting choices. In Achra the increased difficulty encourages further experimentation as, surprisingly, it is possible to make many different kinds of builds work into the highest difficulty levels even as an ever more precise use of conditions and triggers is necessary to fine tune the builds themselves.

The only other thing to mention is the aesthetic of the game. The graphics consist entirely of sprite art with minimal animations, but the writing evokes a fascinating dark bronze-age fantasy world that effectively and seamlessly weaves world-building into gameplay for those players who want it without interrupting gameplay for those who don't.

It is a fascinating work of game design to simplify game design while simultaneously expanding the space of interesting choices a player can make in the game itself, and that is exactly what the developer has done here with Path of Achra.

It's like Path of Exile but only the fun parts