"Leviathan is a monster-training turn-based RPG with permanent death and randomized roguelike elements, providing a different playthrough each time."

Well, considering randomized roguelike elements are randomized items, that pretty much sums it up. Remember folks, roguelike elements, not roguelike.
It can be beaten in about an hour and offers three different endings that deal with the cycle of life and death. (correct me if I'm wrong)

You depart to bring the protagonist's deceased child to a temple, apparantly, as this temple is where the "fallen" should be brought into. On the way you find fallen monsters you can take into your care and use for battle.

Visually, this game is stunning. Starting right from the beginning in the title screen - probably the most beautiful title screen I've ever seen. Gorgeous. It's even animated - subtly animated.
Leviathan starts with a drawn cut-scene, too, before you go off into a desert.
And after that point, it slowly but surely goes downhill.



The atmosphere starts off rather nicely - I even imagined that the environment might say more about the story than the small narratives. I felt like wandering off like I did into Shadow of the Colossus. That would've been very nice indeed, as you spend 95% of the game wandering and fighting about, but there is little to see, as you wander from one death-breathing area to another. Buildings and ghosts that obviously dislike you are all you see.

Unfortunately, the atmosphere really did have a lot of potential - but while the general aesthetics are superb, there are little to no details that might deepen it, and the areas in themselves are repetitive.
Furthermore, the wind sound effect is overused, to say the least .. it's fine for one area, but if almost all you hear is wind throughout the entire game (loading screen included), it starts to bother you.
The music plays along quietly, too - a little bit more variation tone-wise would've enhanced the experience as well. Even the music for the last boss-area (for one ending, at least), does not vary that much tone-wise - it is music that builds up, but gets to nowhere.
The music continues during battles, which is fine, as it is a "natural" occurence, but it adds to the monotony.
There are short cutscenes between each area, picturing the story of a boy and girl. But they do not add to the general atmosphere, as they depict memories.

The battle system themself is quite simple, you've got elemental weaknesses, support spells, elemental spells, physical attacks; all basics you need.
The key to battle here is not surviving single battles, but surviving lots and lots of them while you gnaw on the little supplies you can get. Healing spells are nonexistent, except drain which doesn't do that much. Considering this, it is hard to say whether cutting down on the area-size would be helpful - after all, it needs some amount of battle to be effective.

Along the way you find new and newer monster that join your fray. You find them more or less dead, offering to bring them along (fallen belong to the temple is, after all, what we know). You can use 4 at a time, each possesses different elemental/status affinities and spells/attacks you can learn. Our ice birdie is both fast and weak to fire, for example.
Their design is by and large unique and very pretty. You just get too many, for my taste. You find more and more, without being able to actually use most of them. While you can level them up pretty fast, you aren't able to properly test them, and it also decreases your interest in the individual monster. Furthermore, as you get them at full health, it also covers up possible survival problems (running out of potions, for example)
As you can save anywhere anytime you can easily avoid permanently losing your monstrous friends.

What breaks the battle system is that you can sell special objects (like slings and some "astral item") which could be used to give a monster a passive bonus for waaay too much money. I assume it shouldn't be able to be sold in the first place, as others of their kind cannot be sold.
As you can buy both mana, health potions and stat boosts for your monsters, you can see the problem here. Money is very limited. (antidotes are pretty much pointless, as poison is cleansed after the fight)

There are a couple of things that do not work that well, especially near the end, which is most likely due to time restrictions.
Regardless of the reason, it does spoil the game quite a bit.
There are three endings, but only in one do you get a "the end", and you still need to use the system menu to get back to the title/end the game.

The endings confuse you, as you have little sense of directions. You can make sense of it, yes, but you need to do it all by yourself and it stays rather vague.
It doesn't help that the one ending you see "the end" in, seems to be the least important story-wise, when it is made the most important game-wise (as you get a line of dialogue as opposed to the other choice)

Endings and musings ahead. While the game leaves questions, the interest to finding out is rather limited.



It looks like a really nice game. And at first glance, it is, but the more you play, the more this feeling wears off.
It has potential, and is indeed very pretty, but that is all there is to it.