This game came out last year. I played the demo, thought it might be okay, put it on my wishlist, and waited over a year to get it.

I am calling this a review, but honestly I wouldn’t normally do that. But I DID finish the game, I just don’t know if there’s anything more to it because… well… read the review. I might actually be wrong about some things here.

Let’s go? This will be a short one because there’s weirdly little to talk about here.

Developer: Playstack
Publisher: Bunkovsky Games
Release date: May 20, 2021
Platforms: Switch, PC, PS4, Xbone, PS5, Xbox X/S (Switch version reviewed)
Genre: Roguelite card game

Review

This is a roguelite deck-builder in the vein of Slay the Spire. You play as a slime. He goes through a dungeon, fights enemies, and tries to get the crown at the end to become the king. If you do that, you get a “but wait there’s more” kinda post-credit scene. I have no idea what the “more” is, because I tried again, destroyed the throne to do another loop of the game, and got the same ending. I’m not doing that again.

Before a run there’s a few things to do. You can pick a pet (or not) which will help in the run. There’s pets that deal damage, give you defense and a few more effects. Then you can spend whatever money you still have from the previous run on upgrades… then you can start your run (with a semi-difficulty choice there I guess, it’s not very clear about what the differences really are).

There’s a few types of rooms you may encounter. Some might have upgrades. Blue upgrades are generally good, red upgrades are either bad or have some negative aspect, and orange are rare pretty good ones. In a full run you do end up getting roughly-similar upgrades each time. If a room has a choice of 2, you need to get one or you can’t escape the room. Then there’s the room with a choice between a shop and either a special path (nothing special) or an upgrade room. Then there’s plenty of completely empty rooms with nothing in them,  sometimes those may have money if you pluck turnips out of the ground. There’s checkpoints (which you can reload from if you die in battle). Then there’s fights.

Fights are against 1 to 3 monsters(I think some rooms might have 4, with one way further back). On your turn you draw a few cards, get a free movement card (and a fire/poison healing card if you’re burning or poisoned), and you have to play cards to either move around or attack. Movement is the number of spaces allowed by the movement card. Moving into a space an enemy is in (unless that enemy has chains around him) moves the enemy to the space you were previously in. Attacks are either melee (hit the spaces next to you) or ranged (either next to you or further). Some ranged attacks can hit anyone in front of you, some need to hit the person in front of you but not further back. And defense saves you from that much damage when enemies attack. All cards have a mana cost. You start runs with 3 mana, unless you used money to upgrade your max mana. Some cards may have special effects that give you more mana, or give you buffs, or nerf enemies. One of the main sources of damage, eventually, will be poison when you realize how strong it is. There’s cards that stack poison or fire. You can get stacked with those as well, and some cards removes stacks or transfers stacks or use up stacks for positive effects like healing.

Fire damage causes some burn stacks, which deal damage at the end of the turn (which will largely get blocked by defense so it’s inconsistent damage). Poison deals damage at the start of a turn, which is way stronger, because defense is removed from the enemy before the poison effect. So stacking poison is very powerful. You can stack up to 99 of poison/burn, so eventually you’re dealing over 99 damage per turn with poison, plus whatever cards you play. It’s pretty useful and broken.

I’ve had glitches where monsters are hidden further back but I’d start a battle with them while in the battle sequence with the first few monsters. This takes the card selector and places the cards below the screen, so you can’t see what you select. Very nice. No idea how something like that happens, but it does.

The biggest problem is that there’s nothing to this game. I already mentioned that I don’t know if there’s much of a post-game because doing a loop gave me the same ending as not doing a loop. And you don’t unlock anything as you go. You do have a few unlockable starter decks which you’ll all unlock after like 2 runs, but basically it’s a choice between if you want to do poison, fire, or normal (just do poison, it’s better). After that, no new cards, no new upgrades… There’s no sense of progression, in addition to every run feeling exactly the same (there’s some randomization but it’s pretty weak, most combat scenarios will be the same each run so unless you just don’t end up getting good cards from battle rewards, your runs will always feel the same)… This ain’t fun.

Overall

The demo for this seemed like it would go in a similar direction as other card-based. There’s no unlockables, there’s no replayability, every run feels exactly the same…  I don’t really have anything good to say about this one. It doesn’t do anything Slay the Spire or Monster Train don’t do a million times better. Maybe there’s some progression to be found if you do a lot of loops… But I don’t want to do a lot of loops just to find out.

This does not get a recommendation from me.