Talented is best described as an infinite skill tree roguelite, with enemies moving towards you and defending yourself from them. Retro-style graphics, interesting challenges, and a charming music style to it.
The Gameplay Loop
The general loop is rather simple. choose a class you have unlocked at the start, choose a few class specific perks to start with alongside the difficulty. and begin the night.
There is a total of 20 nights per run to complete, if you beat the 20 nights you beat the difficulty and can choose to have a harder run next time.
Each night, the enemies you defeat will give experience points, those experience points can then be turned into the skill tree, most of the skills in the tree are generic stat increases. However, there are many unique “talents” to find. Many can be found entirely randomly, however, a good amount are also locked behind “talent packages” which can be found on the skill tree as well.
Going to a talent package and unlocking it, allows you to select from three options of talents around it to evolve into upgraded tiers.
And lastly, even by reaching the end of a skill tree, a portal is available to take, closing off the current skill tree, keeping all benefits, and moving to a new one. With some sort of portal specific benefit.
Extra Content
This game has some extra content available through challenges. By completing different difficulty levels for different classes, you unlock class specific challenges. With some challenges granting skills, others granting new talents to unlock in runs. Overall, they are not strictly necessary, but it is nice to experience a different challenge.
How Understandable Is The Game?
The game for what I recall does not have a direct tutorial, (I originally played this months ago, so a chance exists that a tutorial is present, but I may not recall it) However, even with that in mind, you only need to use wasd to turn the character for them to attack in that direction. And 1, 2, 3, and 4, may have abilities depending on what you pick up in the talent tree.
Besides for that, anything more specific, can be found in the compendium available in the game, which explains a lot of the specific details, for instance, enemies and when they spawn, their speed, and their specific mechanics.
Or how many different portals exist and who they spawn in for, and talents, and what specific talent package they spawn under.
Even if a detail is not completely clear, you can probably find some way to understand it without needing to look up information on wiki’s or guides.
Overall I highly recommend this game for anyone looking for a quick game to play from time to time. It has been heavily enjoyable for me for the short times that I play it for, fantastic concept, great gameplay.