Hydration 2: Oasis

Hydration 2: Oasis is an indie game created with ika. This is pretty hard game to get into and it took me a couple tries to get the concept behind it (And even then I found the difficulty curve too high.) Don't expect a user friendly experience here.

At the start of the game you get to choose 3 special skills to assign to the ASD keys. This is a very important choice. I would heavily recommend having the Wall ability as at least one of your skills because it reduces enemy damage. Haste is also a useful skill to have because it makes your turns come much quicker. I choose Smash as my third skill as it deals extra damage. There are some other skills you can choose, but Wall is a must.

The keyboard controls are going to take some time to get used to. You can use the arrow keys to move, the space bar to confirm or interact with chests, W to open the menu, and ASD to close the menu. In battle you can use ASD to use one of your special moves and space bar to guard.



Read the directions at the start of the game. The main path is north. Going in the caves is optional. As long as you remember that you might actually get somewhere in this game. When you walk on the map a bar will fill up. When that bar fills up you enter an encounter screen. And that bar fills up pretty quickly. You will have a good overdose of encounters, and as you can see there is no escape option.

The combat is in active time, which means you better be ready to push buttons when you get into an encounter. The P at the top represents when you can attack and the A represents the enemy. Attacking will usually happen right away if you choose it, but other skills will take longer to activate. After a couple battles you will level up. I highly recommend spending points on Vitality as it increases you maximum HP. Also, you have 3 healing herbs in your inventory at the start of the game. And you'll use every single one of them.

As you go higher up into the map you will encounter harder enemies. You will lose a lot of HP in battle. HP can only be healed with items outside of battle. You might get lucky and find a chest with an item, but going out of your way to open chest just guarantees another encounter.

The mapping is pretty bland and it can be hard to tell if you have actually made any progress or not. I also noticed that the battles are missing any sort of sound effects, which just made me feel that nothing I was doing in battle was actually doing anything. There's no story, you are just dropped into a cave and told to go up. Most of this game is walking, opening chests, finding a dead end, and getting into endless encounters. If you like your games hard and challenging this might be worth a try, but for me it's a 1 / 5.