It's rare that a game captures me as much as ToME has, where even when I've moved on for the time being I'm still thinking about what kind of character I'll play next.

A word of warning: this game is hard. It's supposed to be. In my (as of time of review) 250 hours (edit 11/25/2020 up to 1k hours now, still just as enjoyable and the updates that have come out and are upcoming are making it pretty easy to keep playing), I've won five times, on Normal Adventure mode (aka you're allowed a handful of deaths before it's permanent). I've been told by the friend who got me into the game that this is a surprising number of successes in that time. That's a lot of time not winning on the difficulty settings the game is explicitly balanced around, let alone going on to any higher difficulty. That's a lot of charaters invested in who croaked somewhere along the way. Unlike a tough game like Dark Souls and Cuphead, there are no infinite lives here (unless you play on Exploration which kind of defeats the point of the game in my personal opinion.) If this sounds like a dealbreaker, you do not want to get this game.

Tl:dr:
Pros - great gameplay, amazing variety of character types, friendly community, helpful, active developers, lore deep and well-developed, but not overbearing for those who don't care, addicting despite being brutally hard.
Neutrals - Soundtrack is hit or miss
Cons - UI is mediocre on the default, free range of control fixes this but the process of fixing is in and of itself unintuitive.
Verdict - I love this game, cannot recommend it enough.

This was my first true roguelike. I've played several roguelites before, my favorite being Crypt of the NecroDancer, but this was the first time I've ever played a game where you can lose all of your progress 7 hours in. And it's been a wonderful experience that I actively look forward to coming back to when I'm not playing.

ToME is a turn based Roguelike that focuses on high fantasy. The world you're in is still recovering from the Spellblaze, a cataclysmic event that rocked the entire planet, and beyond. Whether or not you care beyond that is entirely up to you for the entire first half of the game. The story is all told in lore snippets up until you find a certain artifact that kickstarts the true plot, and it's up to you to read and understand what the world you're travelling around is like. Until the plot does kick in, you are Random Adventurer #4765108, who starts in whatever dungeon your race/class combo starts in, and then just explores the continent for loot and fun. The race and class pool is shallow to start so as to not overwhelm you with choices (and a lot of the more complex ones are locked at the start to encourage you to learn the base mechanics first) and you unlock the others by playing. Witness a summoning event to get summoners. Save a Yeek being attacked to unlock Yeeks. Some are straightforward, others aren't. Every class plays different from the others, and races add flavors to what you're playing making for hundreds of combinations.

The gameplay is turn based and (as someone who has never played a roguelike and therefore has no other tile-based roguelikes in my past to draw from) feels a lot like a combination of the difficulty of Crypt of the NecroDancer with the dungeon style of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. It's a great style, and the depth of the combat system is something I only realized when I started asking why my mages all sucked, only to find out that while I'd been doing well on stats I'd neglected spellpower focus, rendering them useless later due to resistances. The RNG nature of dungeon creation and enemy types/spawns means every playthrough is holding something unexpected, but this can also hurt the experience...if your luck just isn't working out some night, you can have no character get past level 2 due to poorly timed rare enemies.

The game is entirely single player, but there's a chat that everyone is automatically in, and this is honestly one of the best features of the game for me. ToME is complex, you're going to have questions, and the wiki for this game is nowhere near up to date. But, you have several hundred other players, most of whom are likely to know the answer to your question, and generally people are happy to answer (I've been on both sides of this). The developers are active in chat often as well, and several of my questions were answered directly by them without any prompting. When compared to the big wig developers, it's truly nice to see the support the devs have for their players.

...I'm trying to think of any real cons, and I guess the only one I can come up with is that the default interface isn't great, and while you're allowed to move things as you want, the things you'll want to move may have their move icons hidden when you unlock the interface (my advice, change the talent bar so it's two rows deep, you'll want it, and that requires moving the chat and log up, which is the hard part due to the chat move icon being hidden behind another thing). Otherwise, the only thing that even is kind of a con is not every track in this game is a winner, and some themes get a little grating (I love Kor'Pul's theme for two loops a night, then it just bothers me)

This game is great. If you're on the fence about getting it I seriously suggest doing it, and getting the DLCs too...the added classes, races, areas, and events are worth it at a fraction of the cost a larger developer would charge for the content. It's a great game, and I'm looking forward to continuing to explore the world of Eyal.