Adore

My first hour with Adore felt like someone quietly handed me a secret. Here is a small Brazilian indie from Cadabra Games that asks a genuinely strange question: what if the Diablo isometric loop and the Pokémon creature-catching loop were the same game, in the same moment, happening in real time? The answer turns out to be more interesting than the question deserves, and also slightly less polished than the ambition demands. You play as Lukha, a young apprentice Adorer who cannot throw a single punch himself. Every encounter is managed entirely through summoning up to four collected creatures, each mapped to a quick-fire input, each with their own health pool and a cooldown before they can be recalled and redeployed. When a creature's HP hits zero it becomes cursed - unhealed until you return it to the Adorer Refuge hub - and any damage it then absorbs bleeds directly into Lukha's health bar. That small mechanical wrinkle creates something genuinely tense: you are constantly reading a fight, deciding when to pull a creature back, when to gamble on its special ability firing before the energy bar empties. The four creature types - Beast, Nature, Mystic, and Arcane - do not work on a simple strength-weakness chart. Instead, the Synergy System layers essences and augments onto your roster, rewarding the kind of quiet min-maxing that feels earned rather than explained. Runes and Artifacts add further passive layers on top. Early game the combat can feel like mindless button spam, but the depth surfaces once tougher encounters start demanding a considered party composition. Where Adore earns genuine affection is in its presentation. The creature designs are distinct and charming, with rare Blessed and Super Blessed variants carrying unique colour schemes that make roster-hunting feel meaningful. The soundtrack leans on acoustic guitars in a way that gives the world of Gaterdrik a quietly adventurous atmosphere - it is the kind of score that sits in the background and does quiet emotional work without demanding attention. The loading screens, each rendered as illustrated artwork, are a small craft detail that speaks well of a studio that cares about every surface the player touches. The honest criticism, and it is a fair one, is that the mission structure does not match the mechanical depth. Procedurally generated maps cycle through a narrow set of objectives, and the loop of clear-zone, return-to-hub, repeat starts to feel like a chore well before the credits. The roguelite failure state - losing accumulated gold and Fragments on death - is a remnant of the Early Access origins that reviewers found punishing without feeling purposeful. The English localisation has rough patches too, with some mechanic text reading ambiguously enough to slow comprehension. None of these problems break the game, but they stack in the back half in a way that tests patience. For a player who loves the creature-catching genre and has bounced off its turn-based conventions, Adore offers something genuinely distinct. The action-focused combat, the synergy theorycrafting, the small but well-crafted world - these are the marks of a studio that had a clear creative vision and followed it through. The repetition is real, but so is the pull of building one more team combination and watching it click.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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