Hand of Fate
What drew me towards this game was the aesthethics and atmosphere shown in the trailers, and I was not disappointed.
The game is presented as you, the protagonist, sitting across from the dealer, a mysterious hooded figure, to play game of cards.
Everything in the game has a representation as a playing card.
The playing field is a bunch of cards, laid out in small mazes.
Your equipment is made up of cards like weapons, helms, shields and a plethora of rings.
Your enemies are cards in 4 suites (dust, skulls, scales and plague), each of which is a theme (e.g. the card “2 of dust” is a pair of bandits).
– Real player with 64.2 hrs in game
I’m going to try and be as thorough as I can with this review. I’ve been playing the game since before it was released on steam. I think that now they’ve made it clear the game is almost finished I’m going to explain why this game is FAR from finished.
Let me start out by saying that I’m an old gamer, yeah an old guy still playing games. So, the definition of what was and what is now considered a ROGUE-like are two completely different animals. The old rogue-likes were fun games were you crawled a dungeon in search of treasure and weapons much like the new ones. After that the definition has changed. Old rogue-likes required you to use your wits to advance your character in such a way that you could accomplish your goals as long as you played your cards right “no pun intended”. The new rogue likes are a smorgasbord of take it up the proverbial gluteus without any way to counter/block/prepare or even chance your way out of a situation. This growing trend of masochistic (why people think it is) enjoyment has literally turned rogue like games that could have been great from games that lasted weeks, months, & years into ones that only last a few hours, days, or weeks. That’s if you’re willing to deal with them for that long.
– Real player with 42.0 hrs in game
Planet Stronghold: Colonial Defense
First of all this game is a pretty unique mix, it has some flaws yes, but its strengths definitely outweighs them.
The card game, while unusual for such a game is actually really good. Compared to the standart rpg fights in similar games where you have 3 or 4 different spells or attacks and you just have to see which type of elemental damage does the most harm and spam that and throw in a heal or stun from time to time, the card battles feel more challenging. On the highest difficulty level you actually have to think about which cards suit in which situation. Also it kinda suits the theme. While in fantasy settings I prefer the party of heroes wandering around fighting its battles itself, here it feels more like you are the base commander managing troops and resources of your colony and thinking strategically.
– Real player with 33.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Deckbuilding Visual Novel Games.
One of the worst Winter Wolves' games out of the ones I have played. It has very few redeeming qualities and while I usually like WW games despite their flaws, I had a hard time enjoying this one.
Characters
Unfortunately, the characters were very weak in this game. WW can create some interesting characters and I know this, but in this case, I think they missed the opportunity to do so. The good news is that there are many characters you can choose to romance (with the free DLC). The bad news is that the characters felt shallow and unrealistic. I know you don’t play these games for their realism, but one would expect them to at least have some common sense. Instead it seemed like they were doing the most irrational things. For example at some point
! the rebel guy implied that he has assassinated people. Why would he admit that in front of people who are military officers? It makes no sense.
– Real player with 18.4 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
Read More: Best Deckbuilding Choices Matter Games.
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.
–——-
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
Questr
I found QUESTR to be very entertaining. It is not much as a game, but what it lacks in gaming substance it makes up in content.
You start by inviting people to join your quest party. Many of the people lie on their profiles and some characters hate your other members so much that they quit right away.
Every quest has multiple events in which you need to select one characters idea how to solve them. For example you encounter a vampire. Will you send a) the Vegan to talk to him about being vegan b) the drunk to talk about drinking c) or the bro who says he got this as he had to watch vampire movies with his ex. Results might not be what you expect.
– Real player with 29.8 hrs in game
Questr is an RPG parody of dating apps similar to Tinder.
In a similar fashion, you swipe left and right to build the perfect RPG team. Every potential party member has likes and dislikes, levels, costs to hire, and personality traits as well as their own class, guild, and ancestry.
Personality traits determine the outcome of encounters throughout each quest. Beating an encounter raises morale, while failing lowers it. Party members also interact with one another between encounters, further raising or lowering morale depending on how well personality types get along and whether or not you paid attention to likes and dislikes. At the end of a quest, the morale level determines if you successfully complete it, giving you a reward and the possibility of having party members continue to quest with you.
– Real player with 4.8 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
Signs of the Sojourner
This game is fantastic. There’s hardly a negative comment I could make upon it.
Story-wise, your mother passes, and you’re responsible for keeping your hometown alive through her story/trade caravan. You meet a variety of people and learn about/influence their stories, learning hidden stories about your mother’s past on the caravan route and ultimately finding an appropriate ending to the caravan problem (the town relies on the caravan for business, and your store needs to be successful for the caravan to justify coming around.)
– Real player with 43.6 hrs in game
Probably my favourite game of this year so far. I was honestly close to just quitting within the first few minutes, but once I got used to the concept the whole thing became weirdly addictive. I got drawn into the game’s world and was excited to plan my trips, explore all the places, meet the people, solve the mysteries, find out about all the subplots…
The first playthrough took me about 5 hours, and apparently the other ones weren’t much shorter because there was always new content - and admittedly also because I’ve spent quite some time figuring out which cards to collect and to play and on retrying conversations… I’m almost done with my 5th playthrough, all of them lead me to a few new places, people and stories, and there are still some left to explore.
– Real player with 30.7 hrs in game
Fight with love - deckbuilder datingsim
Go into fights and use word cards to construct sentences of love that damage your opponent if you do it right, maybe… there was no tutorial, so you just had to… work it out. I like the art though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTeow7UgGvA
– Real player with 10.2 hrs in game
This game sounded interesting at first. An unusual slay the spire type game. The problem is, it still feels like a barely playable demo even after being released from early access. It fixed the problem where the cards in your deck didn’t shuffle, but removed inventory, making the bar, theater and nightclub “date spots” all the same (Before, one sold healing items, one sold cards, and the other sold permanent buffs)
Also, the story is barely translated, and a lot of the cards had been rediculously censored. If this is a game about dating and sex, why can’t the cards swear?
– Real player with 2.1 hrs in game