Today, in One Step From Eden: * It's clear Reva is my best character. Starting to consistently reach 4th boss. * Part of the above came when I realized that "none of the above" is consistently a good idea when choosing rewards. Having a bigger deck can mean having a more cluttered and less focused deck. * Unlocked Terra. I think I've figured out her playstyle, or maybe I just like shooting 12 missiles from cracked tiles. * Potentially good idea: Picking up a 'teleport to opposite tile for 2 battles' pact for potentially +150 max HP. Bad idea: doing so on a character you're not entirely familiar with. Really bad idea: also doing so exactly 2 battles before a boss. * Played another round with Hazel to get a screenshot of the new skin I unlocked last time. I forgot what this one's called. * Round with Hazel ended with me killing Saffron after she'd killed me because she was parked over a Flame tile. Unfortunately, she still had her one free 200HP res. * Unlocked Selicy. Thou shalt face Selicy on exactly round 3. Thou canst not unlock on round 2, nor canst thou defeat on round 4, unless thou deignst to learn advanced attack patterns. 5 is right out. * Unlocked Violette. Same careful destination selection involved. * First time making it to round 5, and the same thing happens against Saffron as happened in my previous Hazel run, only this time, Saffron dies first, and I still don't get credit for the kill. Bah.

more One Step From Eden. * Since last I posted about this game, I've managed to unlock 3 more of the characters and given each a single run. * Playing Gunner made me realize just how much I've been ignoring my equipped weapon and relying on spells. Can't do that here; mana regen depends on firing those gunshots. * My run with Shiso ended so quickly I wasn't able to really get a feel for how the character played. If Reva's the tank, Shiso's uber-squishy. * Hazel is the builder class, focused on passive play while turrets and other structures do the dirty work. My wife, who enjoys playing Necromancers and other summonable-based classes, might like this character, but I doubt I could get them to play this game; at the end of my stream for Extra Life, I overheard them telling someone on Discord, "I've been watching him play this game for 3 hours and I still don't know what's going on." * Two other things about Hazel: this run was the first time I've managed to defeat Selicy at any point. I'd previously gotten at least one kill on every other boss (?) except her. Not for lack of trying, I've probably faced her a dozen times now and I'm not much closer to figuring out her patterns. It would also help to zig properly when the 4 Rows of Icicles attack goes off. The one time I've managed to live long enough to deliver a killing blow, it's been because of landing a lot of Poison ticks with Sludge Bomb and then focusing on purely dodging while Poison and Turrets do the work. And even then, I ended the battle with only 30HP left. * The other thing about my one Hazel run: it ended with me stepping in front of my own Turret and dying. Oops. After that happened, I managed to unlock two skins, both of which appear to be seasonal, and neither of which are listed on the OSFE wiki. (I doubt the former caused the latter.)

For ExtraLife this year, I decided to play One Step From Eden. * Going from Crying Suns to One Step From Eden is a complete 180 with regards to textual lore. Kaliban and your officers will give you a wall of expository text to explain what's going on in that universe. No explanation is given in OSFE as to who or where you are, who you're fighting, or why. * The deckbuilding and battle progression closely follows the Slay The Spire model, but with the grid-based battle system of Megaman Battle Network. * A lot of spells hit exactly 4 grid spaces ahead of your character. This makes hitting things with, say, Lightning Bolt much harder than it ought to be, given 1) remembering to move to the exact distance is tricky in the heat of battle, and 2) enemies don't need to do much to dodge. As if that's not hard enough, Sandwhirl hits exactly 3 spaces in front, and the crosshair marking 4 spaces ahead doesn't move to help you line up a spell to compensate. This is probably what influenced me to pick no-aim spells like Ramjet, Minefield, and Sweeper, whenever they became available. At the default pace gameplay goes, this looks like it's going to take some practice to master aiming. (There is something called "Angel Mode", which looks like it will slow down gameplay by a set percentage, but I haven't experimented with it yet.) * The default character, Saffron, didn't click with me all that much, because there didn't seem to be any underlying theme to their default loadout of spells. (One of her quotes when facing her as a boss -- "Let me show you these spells I found!" -- leads me to believe this is deliberate.) Reva, with her focus on spells that grant or take advantage of shields, seemed to have a much more coherent playstyle. * I also managed to unlock Shiso, but only at the very end of the last run before I was to raid the next streamer in the queue, so I haven't played him yet. * I picked this game to play for ExtraLife this year, mostly because of the Twitch integration: the chat can vote with #0,#1,#2,#3, for which rewards to take after finishing a battle or leveling up, and whether or not to spare the end-of-zone boss. Unfortunately, likely since I was playing during peak streaming hours of 8-11PM EDT, there was something like a 20 second delay between Streamlabs capturing the gameplay and Twitch displaying it, and so chat ended up having less than 10 seconds to decide. Oh well.