Sephiria review

written 2026-08-14

Sephiria is a top-down action roguelite I played in 2026-08. It has a story that progresses across runs, and took me about 23 hours and 25 runs to finish. My overall opinion is it's pretty good.

Combat

Its combat is much like CrossCode, where you have both melee and ranged attacks, an invulnerable dodge, and a block that rewards you more if you block at the last moment.

Compared to other action games though, I think the implementation of block is slightly better. It's directional, which is important since you're often surrounded by enemies, and blocking attacks costs mana, the same resource you spend on special attacks. A perfect guard costs less, and makes your special attack as a followup cost less, but it still costs some.

The dodge has 2 charges, but they recharge so fast that you're almost never actually unable to dodge.

Enemy attacks are always telegraphed by red lines showing where they'll hit. It may look a bit lame to just have red lines instead of communicating telegraphs through animations, but I appreciate that it's clear and unambiguous. And the lines come in pairs that get closer together over time, indicating *when* the attack will happen.

Building

Building your character mostly consists of adding artifacts with passive effects to your inventory. This is the common denominator of roguelikes, but there are many mechanics that make Sephiria special.

Each artifact has a synergy tag, and having multiple items with the same tag gives bonuses. For example, items that deal cold damage have the "glacier" tag, and for every 2 glacier items you have, you get an extra bonus relating to cold damage.

I'm not quite sure what I think of this system. On one hand, it's cool that you have 2 factors to consider in choosing an item. But on the other, I think it narrows your meaningful options, since you almost want to pick an item with a tag you already have (the bonuses get bigger the more you have, for example, the 4th glacier item gives +6 cold damage, but the 8th gives +8).

Artifacts also have a level system. When you go to an "enchant" zone, you can distribute some upgrade points across your artifacts, which increases their effects.

But what makes Sephiria's building really cool is that the position of items in your inventory matters, because some items are "tablets" instead of artifacts, which increase the level the artifacts in certain positions around them. Arranging your inventory to get max value out of everything can be a hard puzzle - you want to use all the slots buffed by tablets, and you want to stack upgrades on the things that will benefit most, but you can't stack too much because artifacts have max levels. Some artifacts also have restrictions on where they can be, such as only in the top row, only in the outer rim, or the slots to its left and right must be empty.

And late in a run, inventory space becomes scarce. The game balances this really well: you almost always suffer a little bit by lack of space, by not being able to arrange everything perfectly, but never play long without being able to pick up stuff at all.

My only disappointment is the item rarity system. Rarer items are often strictly better than more common ones, and the game offers you choices between commons and rares, which eliminates the commons as meaningful options.

Routing

Runs are divided into 3-6 "floors", each of which takes you through a few levels. For each level, you get 3 choices where to go. Each option has a different reward (level up, artifact, tablet, enchant, money, merchant, upgrade weapon, add inventory slots) and the reward types are pretty well balanced.

Each level has a few rooms you have to explore to find its exit and reward, and occasionally extra rewards, and random fights. Sadly, the level routing is not very interesting because it's all either non-choices (you have to go through this room to reach the exit) or blind choices (you have to walk into the room to see what's there, and if it's a fight, you can't back out). And even if you could meaningfully choose whether to do a fight or not, you almost always should.

Also, the room designs themselves are full of empty space and props that suggest there might be more to explore where there isn't.

Progression

Sephiria is not the only roguelike to have meta-progression (where you unlock stuff, or progress a story, from playing runs), but it has much more of it than any other I've played. There's a hub village where you can talk to characters outside of runs, and rarely do quests forthem. There's a story divided into chapters which advances from winning runs, and you encounter different things during runs depending on story progress, like new floors, new bosses, alternate events or characters where there used to be none.

You unlock a *lot* of permanent upgrades, which I normally hate in roguelikes because it's like the game getting mechanically easier the more you play, but in this game, runs also get longer and harder as you progress the story, so I feel it's kinda balanced? I still dislike having it, but less than its equivalent in other roguelikes, like 20XX.

Configuration

There are several dimensions of unlockable starting parameters for runs. Most importantly, there's 6 weapon types which all have different core mechanics. There's several "costumes" which give different perks and sometimes starting items. You can also pick one arbitrary item to start with. And you can influence the probabilities of getting items with specific synergy tags. And you can spend "talent points", which provide numeric perks like costumes but are more flexible since you can distribute them across 7 stats. I think overall this is one of the most configurable roguelikes I've seen, although the impact of these options isn't quite as high as in others.

Difficulty

It has a type of hard mode I've only seen in one other game and really like. Instead of discrete levels, there's up to 60 points worth of difficulty modifiers you can mix and match. This adds to the configuration potential, and lets you choose what form of difficulty you want.

Multiplayer

It also has up to 4 person multiplayer, but I think the story focus somewhat sabotages it, since (I haven't tried this myself, I'm getting this information from someone in a chatroom) you can only join someone even or behind you in story, and you won't progress if they're behind.