Published: 31 Aug 2024
Last updated: 1 Sep 2024
- Developed and Published by: Mega Crit
- Released on: 2019
- Genres: Roguelike Deckbuilder
- Ratings: 4.5/5
- Originally written: 9th August 2024
I’m still scratching the surface relatively speaking (despite a few dozens hours sunken already, I’m yet to unlock everything! Let alone start the Ascension grind) but this totally has me hooked. The game initially felt quite overwhelming and complicated and took a few runs to really understand - but there’s very few total mechanics, its just deckbuilding on the fly while the Relic system provides a secondary axis to augmenting the deck’s effects outside of the cards themselves. What makes it such a greater sum of its parts is how tightly tuned both the classes and the cardpool for each class - numerous archetypes exist for each class using a combination of cards and relics which is extremely impressive.
The ever-challenging and ever-demanding task is to battle away, not just on a turn-to-turn basis of drawing from your deck, but to bodge together a functional deck that can defeat the enemies ahead without any preconceived notion of what said functional deck looks like - and both within the fights themselves and the intermediate deck-building section, you’re constantly making brand new decisions in brand new contexts and states to achieve that task. It makes the learning process a tough uphill battle and hard to internalise with all the initial randomness presented, but extremely satisfying on calculating a brand new heuristic, card/relic combo or synergy to use for all future runs. I’m only scratching the surface here, but I can already tell how rewarding figuring out how to master this game, one small step at a time.
My sole complaint is that even in these “early” stages there isn’t all that much enemy and boss variety for the numerous runs this game demands to truly master it. Its a minor shame, given how much variety there is elsewhere.
Anyway, I’m off to grind for another 200 hours, see you all at Ascension 20.
(Yes, I haven’t mentioned the art and music or really anything that isn’t the core gameplay loop - for good reason. There’s not much to say, its perfectly passable and doesn’t get in the way nor detract. Its just never going to be cited on a selling point on this game - and while it would great in a perfect world to look and sound as beautiful as this game deserves, the devs clearly knew where to put there time, effort and resources into, the aforementioned gameplay loop).
