In Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles, hurting yourself is how you get stronger

A dice system where healing your opponent can be the right call — and it splits the people who have played it between fascination and bewilderment.

Healing the enemy is also a blow

In Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles, hurting yourself can be the best play of the turn. The game splits damage and healing into two mirrored forces: Purification strikes whatever stands in front of you or heals the player, while Corruption runs the other way — it wounds whoever turns it on themselves, but it can also heal the opposing side. Corrupting yourself on purpose unlocks powers that turn a match around, and working out how much corruption is worth it is the central calculation of every run.

Instead of cards, your hand is built from dice — 350 of them, split between Safe, Balanced and Risky types, each with faces that can be swapped out for new actions. Six Oracles open a run with combinations and playstyles of their own, from cautious casters to warriors who would rather strike first and do the math later. Along the way come Sentinels, companions that reinforce the player's dice, and Blessings that grant passive powers: the ones tied to the Stars help at no cost, while the Black Hole ones help more and charge dearly for it.

Enemies attack with dice of their own, and tampering with their pieces is just as valid as shielding yours. Between one fight and the next, mysterious locations shift the course of a run, and 16 difficulty levels let players set the size of their own challenge.

Three years on, the team is still tinkering with the dice

The game shipped in 2023, but Little Leo Games never put the toolbox away. In the month Astrea turned three, a large update arrived at no extra charge: 50 new Blessings went into the game, alongside brand-new mechanical allies, locations nobody had seen and run modifiers aimed at players who have the old content memorised. A few days later came another pass, this one fixing and rebalancing what the large update had touched.

Earlier in the same year, in July, a smaller patch repaired a single graphical problem — and carried the signature of one person, presented there as the one in charge of the community and, at the same time, as the head of the game's development. It is the portrait of a small team still on call for a title released years ago.

Winning starts with reading

On Steam, where the game is sold, the players who dug into the trade-off between Purification and Corruption keep coming back to the same point: the system is intimidating for the first few hours and then becomes the reason to stay. One player who logged 74 hours, writing in May, calls the result dice randomness pushed to its extreme — and warns that this is not an experience for anyone after a quick, low-commitment session. Another, at 219 hours in April, spared no grandeur: they swear devotion to the game's universe and promise to go on purifying Astrea's corruption, Oracle after Oracle.

The soundtrack and the art direction come up again and again in the same admiring tone. A player counting 115 hours, in September, calls the music the best thing they have ever heard in the genre, and ties that fondness to the fact that the game keeps gaining new content years after release with nothing extra to pay. Another, with 96 hours also logged in September, describes landing a risky sequence of dice as winning at a betting table — and the reverse, when the simplest play blows up in their face, becomes a reason to laugh rather than rage.

A player with only 3 hours on the clock, in September, admits the opening felt strange, but says they got past that phase and praises the same gesture from the studio of adding content without charging again. That is where the veterans' enthusiasm doubles as a warning: the game rewards people who want to study its system, not people looking for any old session to fill an afternoon.

Beaten on the first attempt, and that is no compliment

Not everyone reads the system the way the veterans do. One player with 1 hour logged, in September, won the entire campaign on a first attempt — and came away annoyed rather than satisfied: a genre that promises to start over and get harder with every run should not hand over victory that early, nor pile up so many advantages right at the start of the progression.

The confusion shows up in another corner of the same system. A player with 7 hours, in October, describes fights where it is not always clear why a blow lands or why the opponent goes down — the stack of effects on each die complicates more than it clarifies. Someone who reached 8 hours, in 2025, objects to something else: the visual repetition, everything painted in saturated reds and blues, wears the eyes out sooner than the mind — and for that person not even the soundtrack holds attention, contrary to what other players describe.

In the end, praise and complaint come from the same place: the crossing of numbers that the veterans describe as a thrilling betting table is, for anyone who does not want to go deep, a sum that does not add up.

For players who like doing math mid-match

Astrea serves people who enjoy opening a mental ledger in the middle of a turn — how much corrupting yourself pays off, which die to swap, which Blessing to take on, even knowing the bet may not come good. It is for players who have already played other deckbuilders and want to see what happens when damage and healing change places.

It does not serve anyone after a short, predictable session. The player who finished everything on a first attempt thought that was bad, not good, and anyone who dislikes puzzling out why a blow worked will give up well short of understanding the system. The palette locked into red and blue is unforgiving too for eyes that tire easily — and for that audience not even the soundtrack holds attention.