Continuing our coverage of the Steam Next Fest we have Vivid World, a turn-based roguelike where you collect and upgrade different party members.

Vivid World puts us in the shoes of Lemuria, a schoolgirl who is mysteriously transported alongside her classmates into the afterlife. Lemuria is the only one who makes it to the other side with her mind and body intact, and now sets out to find remnants of her friends, who are now spirits.

Throughout the game, Lemuria will collect different party members in the form of jewels, and do her best to cooperate with the shady grim reaper figure who guides her through the underworld in search of her classmates.

Possibly the first thing players will notice about Vivid World is its gorgeous art, which feels like a chibi version of the style used in Vanillaware’s older titles like GrimGrimoire and Odin Sphere. The party members you collect all have distinct appearances, and look really cohesive amongst their own factions.

The game’s environments also have a sort of pop-up book aesthetic to them, which looks really nice. So far we only got to see the game’s first area, which is built as a series of forest tiles, but it overall looks very charming.

While Vivid World‘s art style is beyond amazing, the same cannot be said about its gameplay, which feels uninspired. Vivid World is not exactly a genre-defining game, and perhaps fumbles the way it mixes the auto battler and turn-based genres together.

Vivid World‘s gameplay works similarly to League of Legends‘ Teamfight Tactics, where you are given a team of characters to choose from, and upgrade them by mixing multiple of their copies. Every character has a faction they belong to, as well as an associated color, which provide different buffs.

Both colors and factions have team thresholds at 3, 5, and 7 characters, so your goal is to find what buffs have synergy with each other to create the best team you can, while also trying to compensate for RNG by adapting your party accordingly.

One interesting thing is that characters apply their team buff to your party permanently whenever upgraded, so for example, as long as you upgrade enough cowboy units, you don’t necessarily need any cowboys in your party to make use of their team composition buff.

The game’s combat also works similarly to Teamfight Tactics, where your characters will attack until they can unleash their unique skill. Vivid World doesn’t necessarily play by itself like most auto battlers, as you instead acquire different skill gems that perform certain actions every turn.

The game’s combat is reasonably deep, thanks to the skill gem combinations and all the different buffs that characters activate, but the player doesn’t have much agency over what the characters do, so it feels useless to try and engage with most of Vivid World‘s systems aside from team-building.

Vivid World‘s combat fails to capture the “brain turned off” gameplay of other auto battlers by having a lot of unique skills and different systems, but it also can’t necessarily find any depth thanks to the lack of control that comes with the auto battler genre.

Almost every character in the game has a unique skill that does damage or applies a buff/debuff, meaning that you constantly keep seeing these different abilities, but never really get to interact with them directly, as your characters will just randomly used them after attacking for a few turns.

Vivid World‘s attempt at having characters with very specific abilities sort of clashes against its more casual gameplay where you just use whatever skill gem isn’t on cooldown at the time, alternating between doing damage or blocking if it looks like the enemy will perform a dangerous move.

Something that’s also rough is how the game’s special attack tooltips don’t feature direct damage values, and are worded as equations. Instead of saying “Deal 25 damage to one enemy” for a unit with 18 attack, the description says “ATKx140% -> 1 Enemy”, which reads like an unfinished skill description.

The demo for Vivid World is pretty short, and only lets us do the tutorial dungeon as well as one regular run with 7 floors and one boss at the end. The game is not bad by any means, but even this short 90-minute demo felt repetitive.

This preview shows that Vivid World requires players to be really invested in auto battlers to be able to engage with its systems, and fans of turn-based combat won’t necessarily get much out of it if they don’t like this genre mixture.

While this is most likely a personal issue, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that Vivid World would have been much more engaging if it worked like a classic RPG instead. At the moment, the game’s art is beautiful, but its gameplay feels incredibly difficult to get into, unless you are a fan of its predecessor, Vivid Knight.

Vivid World is set to release at some point in early 2024 on Microsoft Windows (through Steam).