Etrian Odyssey III HD

First time beating a dungeon crawler. I really liked this one, and will be playing through the rest. It was the right amount of grind on normal. You have to meta and plan how you want to build your team, otherwise you'll be like me and doing some resting even after retiring, but it was still fun. The sea boss fights make it pretty easy to catch back up.

Game is punitive. It tries to be difficult by making your map disappear and making you scrape to find hidden doors while making sure you are constantly under leveled. The first game in the series was the only good one. This game feels like it hates me. Like everything is either tedious or punishing just for the sake of it. At it's core the game could be great.

For Steam Deck users: If you are thinking about drawing the map on the touch screen with a stylus, be advised, it doesn't work very well. The Steam Deck touch screen isn't very good for dragging and holding icons, and the map gets very confused when drawing walls. Not recommended. That said, the controller implementation is fine and, well, everything else about this game is great. It's Etrian Odyssey 3. Recommended on sale.