Loop Hero
A wonderful, clever and new take on the roguelike genre w elements of other genres that would seem contrary, yet it works perfectly as a whole. There are plenty of secrets and combinations to discover, and I would suggest a new player stay far away from any spoiler guides as a big part of the fun is discovering these hidden elements on your own. Graphics are good for the style they’re trying to emulate and there’s a definite minimalist aesthetic to the game that adds much to the overall story and themes of the game itself. Honestly, after all the time I’ve spent, I really just want more of everything and hope there’s an expansion or, at least, DLC coming. I’d take a sequel too, as long as it maintains the core of the first one. This is, of course, best for people who actively already love the genres this straddles, have an open mind and love experimental games, or, at least, are not slaves to the graphical arms race of the triple A field.
– Real player with 289.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Deckbuilding Tactical Games.
7/10
Loop Hero is a very impressive and creative indie game. However, the advantages of this game cannot hide the disadvantages.
Roguelike, Management, Tactical. Of course, this game has such rich elements, you might feel very interested in the first few hours. Keep playing this game, you will find it becomes a little boring. You also need to spend a lot of time on this game or you might not pass this game easily, even from my points of view, this game maybe not worth you to spend those time.
– Real player with 107.2 hrs in game
Black Book
the only guide in English on here (at time of writing) suggests paring down your deck to as few cards as you can manage, which is genuinely helpful especially if you’re getting frustrated with the game mechanics or want to speed things along. however, there’s too many cool spells for me to consider that, and there’s something to be said for equipping the max allowable and getting a rogue-like experience of figuring out how different spells play off each other. getting a page of random spells and figuring out how they best work together is definitely part of the fun for me.
– Real player with 53.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Deckbuilding Story Rich Games.
RECOMMENDED.
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Long, fun, you learn a thing or two.
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Searching for synergies is needed and pays off when you find one or two that works
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Item managment is important!
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You need to balance your activities progress but have a lot of room to experiment and change skill points.
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The exploration in 3d its kinda yanky, but doesnt affect the main gameplay and you wont even care.
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Your choices do come back to haunt you, and the choices you take do actually have consecuences inside the gameplay too (but thankfully you can always course correct)
– Real player with 48.8 hrs in game
Vault of the Void
Challenging, fair, and fun deckbuilder that respects your time and brings meaningfully novel mechanics to the genre.
Vault of the Void doesn’t feel like early access, yet I am excited that it is.
When I started my very first game of Vault of the Void, I wasn’t sure if it would click with me. I needed to see depth, but at first there was only complexity. I wanted the stimulation of challenging puzzles and the pull of seeking and sequencing powerful combos; instead, I was met with loads of text (with tooltips for some things) and a bizarre mechanic where enemies announce their attack, make their attack, but don’t actually do damage until the end of your following turn.
– Real player with 162.8 hrs in game
This hidden gem deserves more recognition than it currently receives. Personal views sees this game as a fantastic deckbuilder game. I’d even deem it on par with Slay the Spire, the corner-stone and genesis of many deckbuilders on steam. Here is a perspective to appreciate this unrecognized game:
Vault of the Void establishes a sense of strategy to it more so than other deckbuilding games. This includes each battle reward known prior to starting a floor. This allows the player to strategically plan their route from the start of the game. Additionally, the player, prior to the run’s beginning, inspects the vault guardians at the final floor. These vault guardians possess mechanically intense battles, and rewards to fight the final boss: the Void. These two out of four vault guardians must be killed prior to killing the Void, so prepare for difficult fights and satisfying rewards by strategically building decks.
– Real player with 101.6 hrs in game
Griftlands
Updated for Flourish & Mettle Update
My opinion of Griftlands is largely unchanged from my original review (below). The combat is tight and you’re frequently just a misplay or two away from losing a big fight, but the RPG elements get increasingly gimmicky the more you play. It’s sort of sad that choosing whether to help someone or not really depends on whether the passive bonus they give for loving or hating you is important or not. At higher prestige runs then you feel somewhat punished for taking an in-character action that ends up giving you a malus - I understand that’s a strategic trade off you have to make, but it highlights where the RPG and strategic aspects clash jarringly in Griftlands.
– Real player with 45.3 hrs in game
TL;DR: Slay the Spire meets RPG. Production values are high but card gameplay is inferior to StS. Not a game I expect to play over and over again. Passable.
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Have you ever played Slay the Spire adn thought to yourself, “Man, this game could use more story”? Well, Griftlands is that game! Narrative, great writing, flavour, design, environment, Griftlands has all you’d want from a card battler rpg!
…Kind of.
I like Klei. I do! Their products, while not always for me, are usually quite innovative and interesting. So I’ve been keeping a close eye on whatever they produce. In this case, they borrowed the card battling mechanics VERY VERY heavily from Slay the Spire, and added in all the essential elements of RPGs and made it well. In these ways, the production value of Griftlands is significantly higher than Slay the Spire.
– Real player with 36.2 hrs in game
Watch Me Stream My Mental Breakdown
A deckbuilder game with a novel theme and a twist in mechanics because it has a visual novel built around it, with its own set of problems and goals. It’s designed to be replayed, with the goal of earning permanent starting cards after winning the overall game, so it gets a little different every time. The plot is simple, but that’s fine because the point of this game is the cards.
I thought the little details in the story were charming. “Panda” really captures the essence of a streamer, and it makes dealing with disappointed parents feel more lighthearted when they’re pandas. It’s a game that’s not trying to be serious so you can focus on the cards and I appreciate that.
– Real player with 43.6 hrs in game
I want to enjoy this game, I really do, and I understand a lot of the references and tropes in it are geared towards jaded streamers who agree with the fact that there really isn’t a guide to go about streaming successfully. That being said however, I want something of a guide, a meter, something more than viewers to tell me I’m successfully streaming. I’ve tinkered with the length of streams, I’ve tried to be conservative, tried to be nice and run the nontoxic suite, I’ve tried to be combative and run the ego trip end the stream as quick as possible, I’ve tried to go full immunity and keep my chat from hitting me, I’ve let chat beat up on me to rest up next week, doesn’t seem to matter, I don’t see any difference in my stream results. Maybe it picks up when you get your viewership set, either way I don’t know if I have time to keep playing to try to find it, I don’t even know if this is something I will revisit down the line. If you play the demo for this know that you’re just going to get more of the same, it never seems to pick up, never gets fully explained mechanically. Dunno if there’s more to do with this, if the devs are going to keep making changes, but I’m not happy with it at this point.
– Real player with 23.8 hrs in game
Tainted Grail: Conquest
Song: Tainted Grail Artist: Vlakabaka
“Sometimes I feel I’ve got to, run away, i’ve got to, play a chill card game for a run or two
And the love we shaaare for card games is all in d’ere, with 9 classes, lots of deckbuilding and re-play-aability
Some runs might end baaad and some might go well but with this game time seems to goo noo-where
And this Tainted Grail is full of story, voiiiice acted characters in a daark tainted woorld
So taaake Gabens tears awaaay and buyy diz game here, cause you dont want to hear any-moe from mee
– Real player with 73.6 hrs in game
It’s very similar to Slay the Spire and Monster Train but you’ll like it more than either of those if you prefer a dark aesthetic. The music and story are also more substantial here than other games in the genre. You get access to 3 classes (basically archer, fighter, invoker) which determine the type of base deck you’ll play. Every class is broken into 3 subclasses (i.e. invokers can be summoners, blood mages, or necromancers) that each have unique passives and a unique subclass ability. It’s honestly pretty remarkable how each subclass feels very distinct from its counterparts.
– Real player with 69.4 hrs in game
Vivid Knight
This is a cute roguelite and auto-chess crossover. It’s very strategy-focused, and the difficulty makes it quite addictive, but some balance issues begin to detract from enjoyment once you’re deep in the game.
The Good
The core game play is roguelike, with your character exploring a maze and fighting monsters in turn-based auto-chess-esque combat. Each step consumes mana, a limited resource that refreshes on each floor, and your team begins taking damage when you run out of mana, forcing you to be efficient in your exploration.
– Real player with 62.5 hrs in game
Welcome to Auto Chess Darkest Dungeon, But Cute.
Jokes aside, this little game so far is one of the biggest surprises of the year for me. I do quite like the auto chess formula, but this game takes a quite unique spin on it which makes it really enjoyable for me.
I’ve seen a lot of reviews making comparisons to TFT and they’re not entirely wrong by drawing the said comparison.
That said, if you’re familiar with games like Auto Chess and TFT, there’s a few things this game does a little different.
– Real player with 32.4 hrs in game
Gang of Paws
Fun game!!! Hard, but very fitting for a roguelike. Quite unique battle system and CRAZY cute animals (obviously the development team of this game has a great sense of humour). There is a lot of content and different ways to build up your character with different spells and power-ups. A sort of strategy and action game combo!
– Real player with 66.7 hrs in game
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Gang of Paws is a roguelike deckbuilder with real-time battles.
You start with the bunny and need to find a portal on each map. After beating the boss, the portal will appear and you’ll get onto the next map. If your HP reaches zero, the run is over. You can get new powers, cards and upgrade them throughout your run.
– Real player with 2.4 hrs in game
Roll
Roll is original and engaging. You roll dice to collect points, and use those points to upgrade your dice. The goal is to get the highest score possible in 2500 rolls.
It is likely to be too ‘mathy’ for some - figuring out which upgrades will generate the most had me setting up spreadsheets. However, some players like that sort of thing and once I got my head around the upgrades (most of the upgrades, there are some I still don’t really understand), I found I could do pretty well playing from the gut - which is more fun for me.
– Real player with 24.9 hrs in game
The man behind this game seems to be very passionate about the project. He has been putting out updates very frequently and even wiping leader boards with significant enough changes. he has also targeted and stopped (as far as I can tell) cheaters so the in game leader boards should be fairly accurate. On the limited youtube content available for this game he pops up time to time to interact with people in the comments section and answer questions or even just say hello, seems like a small thing but its kinda the reason I started playing. A random video about it popped up in my youtube feed and after seeing the dev in the comments seem so genuinely happy to talk to people about the game I figured id give it a shot. Im having a great time with this and id say its well worth the $4.99 I paid for it. I normally value my time as a gamer at roughly $1/hr of gameplay and Im only a few days into owning this game and I have already surpassed that mark. This deserves more attention and I think that if a community starts up around this it could really be a fun experience. Honestly my biggest gripe is that if I dont understand something or want to look something up about the game its simply not popular enough for google or youtube to understand what Im talking about and I havent come up with the right buzzword to have a more efficient search. “roll” and “roll game” paired with whatever Im trying to search or even by themselves usually yield either DND results or other games. but Im not even really sure thats any fault of the developer. If you have an extra $5 lying around you wont feel like you wasted it on this game
– Real player with 13.3 hrs in game
Crawlyard
The performance starts – unending, ever changing, cruel to its actors and viewers alike. Yet you are far from being powerless: you can affect the Mansion’s backstage, send puppets to explore its mysterious rooms and rewrite the play however you see fit.
Every new pattern will bring new opportunities, your bonds with other members of the audience will grow stronger, until one day you finally discover the perfect scenario that the previous owner of the Mansion was obsessed with.
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Card combos: rooms affect each other in many surprising ways. Find out how you can utilize it to develop your own winning strategy or make your runs more challenging. But beware: some patterns may prove to be too difficult for specific puppets.
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Indirect battle system: strategy and preparation are the key to success. Plan your way carefully, exploit the rooms' mechanics, use spells and make event-related decisions at crucial points to end up victorious.
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Adaptability and growth: your puppets already offer different play styles for you to choose from, but with the items found in the rooms you can customize and buff your heroes even further – or uncover new doll parts to build unique fighters.
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Intertwining stories: meet other characters bewitched by the call of the Mansion. Get them to open up to you, learn about their traumas and manias, and affect their future – perhaps in a romantic way. The more you give, the more you obtain in return.
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Choices matter: the others are stuck, but you can still move forward, unraveling the threads of their unfortunate fates. Will you advise your new comrades to do what they want? Or will you suggest they search for what you think they need?
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Reach the Endgame: grow stronger, collect enough hints and find the perfect pattern – the ultimate room layout that will reveal the Wishmaster. Have your desires fulfilled at last… unless you found something, or someone, along the way that made your change your mind.
Going strong! We’re a small indie team, and every wishlist brings us closer to completing our passion project. Thank you for your patronage!
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