It's entirely possible that your characters in expeditions will be killed if you're too active in getting them into combat, and settlements tend to be far away when bad stuff tends to happen. With that being said, Thea has no problem with challenging you, either. Naturally, environments are randomised, and at times this does mean you'll be walloped from the outset from stuff that you don't really have a hope of countering, though this happens mercifully rarely, and the game does a good job of balancing so that the challenge level escalates as your abilities should. Thea generally looks understated - like a downbeat Civilization might, though on the Nintendo Switch, the relative lack of detail isn't noticeable (nor, really, noteworthy).
This is where Thea works best as an RPG it really does feel like you've got a lot of control in terms of how you go about surviving in the world, and designing your characters and forces to take on the challenges that it offers.
Those non-combat resolutions work much like a combat sequences, but the strength of the opponents will vary, and the rewards and consequences for victory and failure, respectively, will be different. Many encounters can be resolved in non-combat ways, too, and it's possible (and, indeed, critical) in the later stages of the game to form units that are focused on stealth, diplomacy, and other skill sets. It's a highly strategic and enjoyable system, and a very clever way of making the most of limited development resources (that would have restricted a more full-featured tactical combat system, let alone an action combat system).
Then, you need to array those characters against the opponent, using special abilities to modify outcomes, while ordering them in such a way that you can defeat your opponents before they can defeat you. For each member in the "unit", players are given a card representing that character, with the character having attack and defence abilities, and special talents, based on their equipment and combat abilities. Once combat has been joined, Thea offers up a difficult to explain, but easy to learn, combat system. That comes at the expense of accessibility at times, as there's less of the familiar for those of us that aren't as familiar with the source material, but certainly the game does a great job of making me want to learn more. Thea: The Awakening, on the other hand, is much more focused. Where The Witcher - often heralded as the game that really champions a mythology that is generally exotic and under appreciated in the world - often comes across as too homogenised to really work as Slavic mythology. Encounters with non-hostile (and some hostile) forces on your journey can lead to all kinds of unexpected events, and rooted in Slavic mythology and stories that it is, Thea genuinely feels like some kind of cultural artefact. The most immediately impressive thing about Thea is the one element you probably didn't expect to care about going in the storytelling. The other group is an exploration unit that goes out into the fog-shrouded world, completing quests for the denizens that inhabit it, while fighting off the hordes of skeletons, spiders, orcs and worse that they come across. In Thea, you start out with a single small village, and two groups of people one group of people stay in the village to improve its facilities and turn raw materials into clothing, buildings, tools, weaponry and proper meals. Related reading: Our review of Thea on its release on PlayStation 4