Zoeti is out now on Steam, which means players around the world have the opportunity to become an Astral Envoy and seal away a powerful demon trying to end the world. To do so, you’ll use a deck of playing cards to make poker hands, using a full house or a flush to activate a variety of skills and abilities from the game’s playable characters, Valentina, Alves, and Nicora. And like any roguelite, you only have one shot to take down the big boss. If you play the wrong build, you’re out of luck and need to start all over again. If that happens, though, don’t fret! You’ll still progress through the game and this blog is all about what that progression looks like.
There’s four forms of out of game progression in Zoeti, difficulties, maps, game modes and character experience. Whenever you embark on a mission, if that mission is successful, you will unlock new aspects of the game to explore. Beating a mission on Normal, for instance, unlocks the Hard difficulty. Beating the first story map in Story Mode opens up the second story map. And beating story mode will unlock Adventure Mode, a randomized run pulling from all three story maps to create a truly epic experience to play through. All of those only unlock when you successfully defeat challenges, however, and failed runs won’t affect difficulties, maps and game modes. Successful and failed runs will, however, alter how your characters play, granting experience which allows your adventurers access to new skills and items on your next run.
Successful runs in Story Mode will unlock new maps to play and new difficulties to play on. For instance, completing the first map, Saintly Trial, on Normal difficulty will unlock the same map at Hard difficulty and unlocks the second map in Story Mode, Hidden Danger, at Normal difficulty. While Saintly Trial on Hard will challenge you with stronger enemies capable of dealing more damage, attacking more times and having more powerful buffs, they will ultimately be the same enemies attacks and buffs native to that run. You won’t see new bosses or monsters in the random pool at Hard difficulty, they will just be more powerful and require more coordination to take down. This same principle is true for every jump in difficulty in the game, from Normal to Hard to Horrific to Nightmare to Inferno.
The Hidden Danger, however, will challenge you with new monsters, new bosses, and new mechanics throughout your run. In Saintly Trial, you’ll never have to face elemental damage as the fiends you come across in the idyllic plains don’t attack you with the power of Fire or Frost damage. The Hidden Danger, set in the towering mountains overrun with demons trying to free the most powerful of their ilk, introduces Frost damage for the first time to players as well as Chanted spells, channeled for powerful effects that require the player to do enough damage to interrupt them.
Once all three Story Mode maps have been defeated, you’ll unlock Adventure Mode, a randomized experience that pulls from all three of the Story Mode maps. Every mechanic from all three maps can be in the pool, as well as monsters and events unique to the individual story mode maps. Adventure Mode does include narrative events and experience but it doesn’t include the same kind of plot-centered experience that Story Mode offers. Where in Story Mode, you’ll follow some of your friends like Snowball the Innkeeper or Giseca the Valkyrie as they tell their stories, in Adventure Mode, you’ll skip those kinds of narrative, dialogue-based experiences for something that gets you right into the gameplay.
But you won’t just progress with the kinds of difficulties and maps you can play with, you’ll also progress the characters who you’ll be playing as in your Saintly Trial to become a Star-Soul Hero. Valentina the Knight, Alves the Assassin, and Nicora the Sorceress all have levels and need you to run maps in order to level them to max. Each character has ten levels and each level they reach unlocks three new skills which can be offered in your next run. While all three characters tend to start with fairly basic, straightforward mechanics, as you level them up and master their playstyles more and more, you’ll start to see more advanced effects unlocked for them. Similarly, every level will unlock a specific accessory that character can discover in their runs, an item that will power them up as they take the fight to the fiends threatening the land.
If you want to level all three characters to max, see the story of Zoeti unfold before you, and defeat the most powerful bosses on Inferno difficulty, you can play it today on Steam! Let us know what you think of it in the Akupara Games Discord or on the Akupara Games Twitter!
-Riv Otter