This is an excellent chill roguelike deckbuilder with fantastic, satisfying presentation.

This game is not at all difficult for the genre - I could beat the max difficulty fairly consistently, back at a time I was struggling to get to even A10 in STS1 (which is to say, I was bad). I think it is a shame that for years the review scores have languished at mostly positive from complaints about difficulty.

The deckbuilding balance is pretty relaxed. You do need to build up synergy, but most combos you find generally give you a moderate boost, rather than a huge power spike. This gives it a more relaxed progression curve where you're not racing to get combo pieces in place before you die.
The companions adds a cool side system to progression. It's not a whole extra dimension, more of a bonus, but it feels well integrated and unconvoluted. They're a little variable in how interesting they are - I found the ones I liked and stuck with them.

Not being able to skip cards is a little more controversial, but is another design that makes the game feel chill to me. You never have to worry if adding a or skipping is better - you just pick the card that fits best.
There are many cards that exhaust or are removed from the deck after use and card removal is plentiful, so your deck doesn't bloat out of control. I honestly prefer the game being balanced around no skip to everything except fixed decks where new cards replace old ones (like Vault of the Void).

The near/far system, enemy mechanics and character/faction mechanics work together to make playing fights out a little spicier than most deckbuilders, without being too taxing. There's a decent amount of card draw and creation in the card pool, so you don't get screwed by missing your interaction cards often. I'd say it's at a sweet spot for feeling satisfying without actually requiring you to think hard.

QOL is decent for the genre, there wasn't really anything that really grated on me. I appreciate that the game does not make you wait for animations to finish between each card you play, and slows/speeds time in a way that looks kinda cool. I might be praising an overly obvious feature here, but I've played enough turn based games that get this wrong and it's almost always enough to make me instantly drop them.

There's a good amount of variety here, with all the different characters and companion options. The bosses and encounters feel distinct enough to not feel super repetitive (- I particularly like the horde type fights, they're good fun). That said, there's not a massive number of encounters and boss variants, so it's not really endlessly replayable.
I beat max difficulty, tried out a bunch of different character/companion combinations, then was done. I haven't played over and over like Vault of the Void (or more recently STS2), but I was satisfied with the value I got. The game is not much on sale these days.

It's a bit weird that the characters never talk to each other or anything, but it's better than having them yap constantly. You don't really get any story in this one. It's not really a problem, but it does feel like something is missing when you win a run.

I tried the game on Steam Deck - it works great. It ran fine on a potato PC back in 2023 too.

Overall, I'd recommend Beneath Oresa if you're looking to play a deckbuilder that plays on the more relaxed or casual side, without being bland or spiceless. You won't get super deep gameplay here, but sometimes you just want to hit a guy with a big sword, make them get shot by their friend, then trigger a counter attack for 100 damage.

I like this game alot if the hours I put into it doesn't show it. I got every single achievement and despite playing so many hours in this game it's very flawed and ridiculously time consuming and unnecessarily punishing.
You could be having an incredible run and after several back to back cheap shots you've wasted an hour of your life. Which is fine that's how this kind of game goes.......if you decide to play it the way the dev's want you to play. ALT-F4 whenever you get a bad antiqorum line up, ALT-F4 if you have a garbage quest line up and try again, ALT-F4 when you finish a battle and you get terrible techniques.
This game is made to waste your time and force you into poor runs, you're not given the ability to reshuffle your rewards or even retry a battle so in an effort to prevent people from forever ALT-F4ing this game and never even finishing a full run, take my advise and don't let the game waste your time and instead shuffle the deck to your advantage.
TLDR: It's a fun roguelike.