I’m always a sucker for games with creature collecting as a core mechanic. Adore developed by Cadabra Games is one of the newest in this subgenre. It’s also one of the most unique with strong dungeon crawler and roguelike elements. The main story for Adore takes place in the land of Gaterdrik. In this land, humans lived in harmony with the magical creatures that inhabit it. The humans worshipped Draknar, the God of creatures who ensured balance.

Peace endured until Draknar was killed by the evil entity Ixer who placed a curse over the land that turned the creatures hostile. You play as the young boy Lukha, who becomes a host to the last essence of Draknar and is then tasked with restoring him to life. You accomplish this task by adventuring through various environments, capturing creatures, and upgrading yourself and your team members. This is another title where I feel the story is more of a vessel to experience gameplay. It does the job well enough with decent world-building and structure. However, it is rather generic and won’t keep you very engaged.

The core gameplay is similar to a real-time dungeon crawler like Diablo. You have a suite of abilities mapped to various keys. However, in Adore, these attacks take on the form of summons that have their own HP pool. If your creature drops to 0 HP it becomes cursed, meaning it can no longer be healed unless you leave it at the Adorer Refuge your home base. The controls feel smooth on PC with good response time and intuitive inputs.

Additionally, all creatures are separated into four main types; Beast, Nature, Mystic, and Arcane. In contrast to something like Pokémon, these types don’t have strengths or weaknesses against one another. Instead, the importance of the creature types is brought out with the synergy mechanic. Each creature you capture will give you an essence of the corresponding type. These essences can then be equipped to your creatures to bestow them with additional stat buffs, or augments. This allows for an intense amount of customization and player experimentation as you find the team composition which fits your unique playstyle.

Though synergies provide core buffs, you can also upgrade your team even more by equipping your character with artifacts and by cooking special food that grants various temporary benefits. The full roster of creatures is somewhat small with only around 40 to collect. However, each one has stronger forms known as Blessed creatures. These function similarly to shiny Pokémon in that they have different color palettes from the regular versions. However, this aesthetic change also comes with added stat buffs that make it well worth the extra effort to find them.

Though the main gameplay loop is quite enjoyable, a few issues hurt my experience. Resources are incredibly scarce but are in high demand. Food is used to heal creatures during levels but is rarely available, forcing you to constantly swap between team members when some become cursed. Money is used to cook better food or buy and upgrade artifacts but the costs are often highly inflated. Even the storage and capture of creatures is limited to a resource that must be found in levels.

This is where the roguelike elements take precedence as you are forced to backtrack through levels multiple times in order to grind resources. This adds a lot of replay value, but it also became dull quickly. The individual levels just aren’t interesting or expansive enough and thus every subsequent playthrough feels the same. In addition, the creature AI can sometimes be quite frustrating. There’s a lot to manage in combat between moving your character and monitoring health pools between five characters. When one of your attackers simply walks straight through enemy projectiles or hazards and loses virtually all its health in the first arena, you will inevitably lose some patience.

On a more positive note, the overall presentation of Adore is fantastic. I love the creature designs and art direction. It has the whimsical charm of something from Studio Ghibli with wildlife and structures that are integrated seamlessly into the natural world. Adore‘s music is equally as strong. I enjoyed the heavy use of acoustic guitars that mesh beautifully with the tone of our setting.  The game also runs well on PC, with no big issues to report from my end in terms of performance.

In general, I found Adore to be an excellent experience with nuanced and creative gameplay that takes some of the best elements from respective genres and places them together. I’m hoping to see the game add more content in the future with additional creatures, areas, and perhaps some balance adjustments. However, for the price point, I’d still say this is well worth your time if you enjoy the monster-catching genre.

A PC review copy of Adore was provided by QUByte Interactive for this Review.

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Adore

19.99

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• Great art and creature designs
• Synergy system is interesting
• Lovely music

Cons

• Resource scarcity is frustrating
• Poor AI