Overseer (PC) Preview

As I rediscover my love of Roguelikes, Phenixx was approached with a key for an indie title called Overseer. I volunteered to give it a whirl, despite the fact that it hadn’t a single review on its store page on Steam. I could tell on the surface level that it was a passion project by the fact that the listed developer on the page was someone’s name. As such, I set my expectations low, especially considering this is an Early Access title in its first month.

Overseer sees a knight or a wizard engage in a dungeon crawl. Starting in a bar setting, the player can take a look at their abilities, laid out like classic RPGs with recharge rates and the like. Once the player enters the dungeon, they’re thrust right into the action. The goal is to engage three runes, all of which spawn a lot of enemies to deal with. There are stores laid about, as well as chests that require keys.

Unfortunately, the difficulty level in Overseer is unforgivable. There’s a natural difficulty that demands players to perform at their best and there’s an artificial difficulty that barrages the player with bad coding and lack of thought. Overseer has the latter, even on its “harmless” difficulty, as enemies seemingly teleport during their attacks and you can only withstand a handful before death on this difficulty level. There are health fountains, but they only restore a minuscule amount of HP, while your enemies regenerate it.

The weapons and abilities at your disposal are strong enough to withstand these onslaughts but warrant a lot of practice and trial-and-error. I found myself preferring the wizard due to a massively-damaging area-of-effect spell, but his having less HP than the knight made things even harder. Even worse, some of the wizard’s main animations are glitched to look like the knight is casting them, a bit of an oversight that should be easily remedied in the next patch.

Now, I’ve outlined that the game is tough as nails, for the wrong reasons. Does that mean the game is forgone and isn’t worth your time? Not necessarily. While it lacks polish and warrants balancing, Overseer is a known work-in-progress, and all of the work is being done by a team of four. Seeing as the game’s current version is 1.08a, there’s an acknowledgment that kinks will be slowly but surely phased out. Plus, there’s an archer in the bar that looks to be playable soon.

Steam is littered with sub-par games that are seemingly stuck in their own development hell or abandoned, but I can’t say that Overseer deserves to be lumped in with them. It’s more than stable for an initial release and does show promise to improve. All it really needs to get back on track is enemy optimization, and then it has the chance to stand with other Roguelikes. For now, I’ll hold out hope, as the base of Overseer is competent enough, but there’s a good bit of work to still be done in the meantime.

A PC review copy of Overseer was provided by Lamina Studios for this review.