I was pretty interested in this game when I first noticed it, for a pretty simple reason. This is made by Richard Garfield, designer of great board games like King of Tokyo, Robo Rally, Netrunner, and a little-known project called Magic: The Gathering. I figured his involvement in a card-based video game would be pretty cool. Otherwise the game looked pretty interesting, and after pre-ordering I could download the demo, which was interesting enough but I hoped the full game would go a bit deeper.

So let’s go and see if it’s good!

Developer: Abrakam Entertainment SA
Publisher: Nacon
Release date: June 17th 2021
Platforms: PC (it’s coming to other platforms later)
Genre: Roguelite card combat battle game

So you play as a set of heroes that are stuck in a magical book. A ROGUE book. You gotta travel through it and beat the 3 chapters of it in hopes of getting out. This doesn’t work, so you gotta keep replaying it until you can escape or something I guess. I didn’t play through all the epilogues yet, and I have no intention to. I played more than enough for a proper review though. You may not think so but I don’t care 😀

So this is a roguelite card game. You start in Chapter 1, choose a team of 2 heroes (from a choice of 4) which should be Seifer+Sorocco because it’s a better team than any other combination (2 of the characters you do need to unlock before you can use them, one of them is a bit weird to unlock, you need to find a specific treasure and give it to her in a random event). Then you’ll be in a map full of unrevealed hexagonal tiles (you know they’re unrevealed because they’re brown). Generally a path will then make itself between the starting point and the boss battle. At that point you have this hex map to explore, and you can get to the boss when you feel you’ve done enough exploring.

You explore the map by using 2 things. There’s paintbrushes, which reveal spaces in a radius of 2 tiles around you. There’s also ink. Ink either powers up your next paintbrush usage, or reveals tiles in different way. Some from 3 to 5 spaces in one direction, one in 4 spaces in 2 opposite directions, and one lets you reveal a single tile anywhere on the map. You can walk on revealed tiles, unless there’s a battle on the tile. Unrevealed tiles can’t be touched. Normal battles reward you with ink and miniboss battles reward you with paintbrushes.

A revealed tile might have nothing, that’s usually the case. There may be gold on there. There’s heart containers which you can use for healing outside of battle (this takes one of your 3 ink slots though they stack). There’s vaults. Vaults let you choose one of 3 cards (or you can skip), and if you choose a card you have to pay whatever the cost is. There’s alchemists, they will allow you to remove a card you don’t want in your deck and replace it with one of 3 random cards for that hero and even lets you slot in a gem to power up the card a bit. There’s treasures, which are either for  your party or you can choose a hero to equip it to for various kinds of boosts. There’s pages which you use to buy permanent upgrades in-between runs. There’s scrolls, which are “story” events. Usually you get a choice of things to do or say, and hovering the choices tells you the result. These can give you money, cards, treasures, initiate fights and such. There’s places with a gem on them. There’s a racoon dude, he sells you stuff. And there’s 3 types of battles. The boss battle at the north end of the map, grey swords which are normal battles with “weaker” enemies (they’re not specifically easy) and red swords which are minibosses, usually tougher to deal with than regular battles. Oh and some spaces are just obstacles you can’t walk around, you see those when they’re unrevealed as they’re a darker color.

So battles! Each hero has a set of cards they start with. Some of them suck like the regular strike and defense cards. You get more cards from the shop, vaults, “story” events and as a possible reward from killing bosses. On your turn you have a set amount of energy. Usually 3, but there’s ways to increase that from treasures, wells and cards. You draw hands of cards that belong to both heroes, and you play them in whatever order you want, spending energy for each card. Most costs are 1 and 2, but a few cards cost more. Cards can have several effects. Damaging any enemy you want, all enemies, or a specific enemy (usually the leading one) is one of the more important things. Adding block is another, it’s very useful because attacks hit block before hitting your characters’ HP (block applies to the whole party, but for enemies it’s separate between enemies). You can summon allies, some of which will automatically attack for their spirit value, some which will have special effects if you spend their spirit points. Some cards are for status effects (buffs or debuffs), or healing. Some cards dissolve when used (can’t be used until the next combat). Once you’ve used all your energy, you end your turn, allies attack if you have aggressive ones, then it’s the enemies’ turn.

Enemy attacks mostly hit your leading character, so switching who’s in front is a great way to manage your resources. You will take hits, so splitting the damage is a must. You can change who is leading by making the character in the back use a card with Charge. Some cards also have advantages or disadvantages based on your positioning, such as ranged cards costing less from the back and melee cards costing less from the front. Enemies will always have some icon above them during your turn saying vaguely what they’ll do on theirs. If it’s an attack you’ll see the damage value which is very useful.

So the main loop here is to uncover a bunch of the tiles on the chapter to get a few battles for some money and ink, get the 2 treasures on the map, then use a bunch of money at the card vaults, shop and alchemists to get a better deck, then fight the minibosses for a few extra rewards, then fight the boss. There’s some deck-building strategies but they’re fairly simple with the best team of Seifer+Sorocco. Either focus on allies, or don’t… pretty much (and that strategy got a bit broken by the latest patch which I think by error weakened the Lavasurge Axolotl). There’s only 3 chapters, so beat the 3 chapters and be happy.

Outside of a run, you can use pages to put points into a skill tree. Stuff like replacing Strike and Defend cards with random cards, giving extra cash at the start, increasing the rarity of things you find and adding things on the map. That’s it, pretty simple. At the start of a run you get the option to add what are basically nerfs in 3 categories. You can choose one per category, and each one has a number of “points” it adds to the Epilogue meter. You can’t go above the max of that meter. Finishing an epilogue level the first time gives you bonus pages, and each level has a percentage increase of the number of pages you get in the run too. These change some gameplay elements. Some may give you something good like the hat that reveals all the coins on the map, but there’s always something negative-ish. The one with the coins, for example, deals 2 damage to each of your heroes whenever you grab coins. Some of them are really… ass. Some are fine though, I don’t mind the one where the last enemy in line in battle being non-targetable, most of the time that’s not very meaningful. This is the “post-game”. Since there’s only 3 chapters, and each chapter is basically identical minus the fact that things are positioned differently each run, it gets REALLY repetitive.

Also the game is majorly glitchy. The game already crashed all the fucking time in its first version. The latest big patch introduced way more crashes (though a hotfix WAS just deployed before I posted this review so that might be fixed). Heck, the things that made the game crash most for me is right-clicking on the main menu. Seriously, that breaks the game, even if right-clicking on the main menu does nothing. There’s also a lot of visual glitches, like sometimes money being on the map but not appearing visually. Some of the visual glitches also affect gameplay. Sometimes cards you play end up super big for some reason and stay in your hand. They also appear above the rest of the graphics and prevent you from playing the cards behind it. And since it’s a card that was played, you can’t play it again. Very odd. I’m sure there’s a few things I didn’t notice.

Overall

I really wanted to like this game. And there’s a lot to like, I think the gameplay design is largely solid, I like the combat and the deckbuilding is okay. But there’s some misses there.

I find that it gets really repetitive because only one hero combo is worth even playing right now and eventually every run is basically the same. Patches might fix that issue though eventually, as there’s been some balancing in the latest patch. They did fix a few things with the latest patch, like allowing you to look around the map. It did also break things (that aren’t even in the patch notes) like making the Lavasurge Axolotl card weaker which may be a new glitch (it’s supposed to quintuple any spirit gain it gets but it no longer works with the Chosen One card, which it used to and it was OP). Some of the nerfs to “progress” through the epilogues are kinda bullshit as they work against the design of the game. Some are fine (like removing the auto-path to the boss, or making the vaults free but making the shop more expensive), others are a bit dumb (like damaging you for grabbing gold or for playing a card of your leading hero or replacing towers and eyes with shitty fairies you have to kill to reveal parts of the map). And I feel progress ends a bit too early. I got the only 2 worthwhile heroes to level 11 already as I did with the “player” level which is max (and you don’t even get anything for max player level), and I have all the worthwhile skill tree upgrades and I’m only a bit over halfway through epilogues… and that’s where progress ends unless I wanna play with the other heroes… which I don’t. Seifer+Sorocco are just better (and the player stats seem to back this, most runs use that team… because it’s better). All I have is doing all the epilogue runs, which is just continually running through 3 identical chapters over and over… I think this game kinda fails as a roguelite.

One of the biggest problems though is how fucking glitchy this is. The game crashes all the fucking time. Play a card? Crash. Right-click on the main menu? Crash. Move on the map? Crash. It’s constant (and it got worse on the latest patch, before the hotfix which I haven’t tested). And a lot of other glitches like gold being on the map but not visually appearing sometimes at random (so you have to hover every space to see where there may be gold), or cards not disappearing from your hand when played and becoming HUGE and preventing you from clicking cards that are under it.

I can’t recommend this game in its current form. Maybe some later patches will improve on the issues. This game needs a lot of fixing because I can recommend it. I think it could get to a point where I can. But it’s not now. It’s a shame because it’s close to being good.

If you want a game like this, go for Slay the Spire, or Monster Train.