Adore is an Indie Action RPG creature collector and roguelite in which your only way of dealing damage is by capturing creatures and making them attack for you. This game is designed to be difficult right off the bat, and you have limited resources and creature summons, so you’ll need to avoid letting them take damage in order to succeed.
This year, I intend to cover more small indie games alongside my normal content to hopefully find some hidden gems that don’t get the recognition they deserve. Currently, as of making this video, Adore sits at 91% positive reviews so perhaps this is one of those games?
After playing Adore for a bit my first impressions are as follows:
Pros
- I like the way the game controls, movement, ability casting, and animations come across as very smooth and fluid.
- The challenging nature of the game right off the bat, while unexpected at first, made me want to keep playing it and kept me highly engaged. As far as ARPGs go, it feels quite unique relying purely on capturing creatures to deal damage, and due to the roguelite elements, there’s a lot of dynamic gameplay here as each level contains different creatures with different skillsets.
- I liked that feeling of progression I got with the permanent unlocks even if I failed a level. It made the game feel less frustrating and made me want to get right back into another run.
Cons
- I think the tutorial could use some improvement. A lot of the mechanics weren’t explained well enough and I pretty much learned the game through trial and error. The whole Essence system had me very confused and frustrated at first.
- Currently, the game only seems to have 5 stages with 5 different boss fights, so players that are highly skilled at the game might burn through the content very quickly. To be fair though, it is an early access game.
Summary
Overall, it’s a fun indie game that, in its current state, if you tried to clear all 5 stages without dying as a new player would likely take between 2-4 hours of gameplay, maybe longer depending on the difficulty. I think the controls and concept are quite unique and I enjoyed the gameplay, although for me personally, I found it overwhelming visually when controlling more than 2 creatures at once and taking on more than 3 enemies at a time, but then again I just probably need to git gud.
Well, that’s it. Let me know what you think about Adore in the comments below and also let me know if there are any more Indie gems that you think I should cover. I hope you all have a great day and I’ll see you again really soon.
Credits
| Program | Freedom! Scholarship |
| Author | Curtis Pyke |
| YouTuber | TheLazyPeon |
| Publisher | MGN |
| Game | Adore |