Lethis - Daring Discoverers

I have a weakness for the tiny games that fall through every algorithmic crack, and Lethis - Daring Discoverers is almost aggressively that kind of game. Triskell Interactive - a small French studio best known for the Victorian city-builder Lethis: Path of Progress - decided their second release would be a choose-your-own-adventure-style exploration game set in the same steampunk universe. The premise alone is delightful: Lethian scientists invent a giant space cannon and a cloning machine, then decide the ethical move is to fire expendable clone-explorers at alien planets to steal artefacts. It is absurd in exactly the right way. The structure owes everything to tabletop gamebooks. You pick one of five explorers - Bertrand, Gilbert, Monique, Rutherford, or Rose - each with their own illustrated card, and move through a 2D isometric planet surface making branching decisions. Encounters split along two main axes: brute force or diplomacy. Hostile aliens can be fought in a turn-based system that community players have compared to Undertale's combat in its basic geometry, while more peaceful creatures can be negotiated with. Between encounters you collect objects, some useful and many deliberately misleading, and gradually fill a personal encyclopedia with notes on each planet's flora and fauna. Saving that progress back to your capsule before dying matters, because the cloning mechanic means death resets your body but preserves what you logged - a small but satisfying design touch that turns failure into a knowledge loop rather than pure punishment. Six planets make up the full run, and the soundtrack reportedly clocks in at over 50 original tracks - an almost extravagant audio investment for a game this size. Atmospherically, that ambition pays off. The isometric pixel art carries the same Victorian-steampunk warmth the Lethis universe is built on, and the alien world designs have genuine personality. Where the game stumbles is in execution: community reviewers noted bugs at launch and a nagging sense of wasted potential in the combat and exploration systems. The mix of open-world wandering, gamebook branching, and turn-based encounters is genuinely interesting as a concept, but each layer feels undercooked relative to what it could be. The hundreds of illustrated choice screens carry the experience when the mechanics wobble. Who is this actually for? Players who grew up with Fighting Fantasy paperbacks or who bounced warmly off games like Out There will find something genuinely worth a few quiet evenings here. It is not a game that demands much from you mechanically, and that is both its comfort and its ceiling. If you want systemic depth or a long campaign, look elsewhere. If you want a compact, hand-crafted oddity with a lovely soundscape and enough branching to justify at least two runs, Daring Discoverers earns its niche. Just go in knowing it is a small game with big ideas it only partially lands.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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