LogFAQs > #892885362

it does have a story, of sorts: you're investigating the writings of your ancestor and delving into this town that seems to be built on top of a portal to another dimension.

the story is thin, and not the focus. the focus is the gameplay.

you don't exactly 'create' a class; you recruit heroes off a bandwagon and assemble a party of four to send into one of four (eventually a fifth option opens up) sections of the town's underbelly in order to uncover the truths your ancestor hints at.

the classes themselves are pre-written and have set combat statistics, but you control how their gear (which drives HP, defense, and to hit/damage) improves as well as which of their seven combat actions (you can equip four) and camp actions (again, equip three or four) will be advanced. they gain experience from their quests. they also gain quirks, which can be good or bad. the trend is mildly negative--good quirks eventually fill up and start replacing themselves, whereas bad quirks simply lock in over time. you can spend gold to remove bad quirks, or lock-in good ones. you spend the same gold to level your heroes or improve their gear, so you have to manage it. they also gain 'stress', which eventually makes them go insane (very bad!) and potentially start hurting your other heroes or themselves and you'll have to spend gold to mitigate this.

it is fun, but it's heavily dice-based. random chance can TOTALLY fuck you even if you did everything right. you can make choices which will mitigate this to some degree. but many such choices will actually reduce the quality of the loot you find. OTOH, the creators have introduced a new failure condition to the entire campaign, in which if you either take too long or lose too many heroes, your campaign simply fails--the reason for the former will be revealed in the game, for the latter it's just heroes don't want to work with you anymore.
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And when the hourglass has run out, eternity asks you about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.