Inscryption
Played through it twice, the game is the best of it’s kind, rogue like and incredible deck building elements, this game has that “little extra” that games like this need to be successful.
– Real player with 56.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Deckbuilding Horror Games.
great gameplay, amazing story, just wish you could play against the wizard and necromancer too
– Real player with 55.7 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
Read More: Best Deckbuilding Dark Fantasy Games.
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
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 Choices Matter 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
Library Of Ruina
This game taught me that if something an enemy uses seems cheesy, simply use it as well and turn the dial to 11. Exploit or die. Use Gebura and Myo’s effect and leave all your worries behind, until Xiao ends you. Coming off of Lobotomy Corp made me predestined to love this game.
10/10, makes me feel like my IQ is room temperature, in Celsius
– Real player with 176.7 hrs in game
THE BOTTOM LINE
Library of Ruina is a bookstore the size of a city block–you’ll get lost in it for hours at a time, exploring a bottomless well of new and interesting stories to experience and share.
Review as follows:
I spent 160 hours with this game, but it’s lived rent-free in my head for so much longer. The world and story are evocative, unique, and at times disturbing. But the gameplay is just as unique, you’d be surprised how much changes when you strip the “roguelike” from “roguelike deckbuilder”. There’s depths to this game, and thanks to being singleplayer, it’s an ocean of archetypes and strategies that don’t centralize around a defined “meta” you might find in something like YuGiOh or Hearthstone. It’s all the joy of first discovering Magic the Gathering with friends, except in this case you don’t even need friends!
– Real player with 160.0 hrs in game
System Crash
System Crash is a strategic story-rich cyberpunk card game both developed and published by Rogue Moon Studios. Set in the not too distant future this is a story of intrigue, corporate espionage and cyberwarfare. Being a runner is a good, if not dangerous, career choice but after a mission in Berlin goes horribly bad you spend the next couple of months forcibly globetrotting while on the run from Corporate assassins intent on killing you. Eventually evading the pursuers you finally end up back in the “Sprawl”, a.k.a. San Angeles, down on your luck and looking to make some much needed credits. But a runner without a console can’t get any credits so after forging a deal with a local loan shark and finally getting your hands on some black market cyberware you hastily start down your road to redemption. A road that will take you through the darkest most dangerous places in both cyberspace and the real world…JACK IN!!!
– Real player with 49.5 hrs in game
I really love this game.
System Crash is a single-player deckbuilder set in a cyberpunk-style universe. Battles unfold as a number of 1-vs-1 card-based duels over the course of the campaign. The campaign follows a comfortably generic story about hackers and back-alley doctors and shady corporations. There’s a very home-brew feel to the game in general, like it was cobbled together out of assets that were sitting around on a shelf in a garage somewhere.
Despite this, the card-battle system at the heart of System Crash is fantastic. It is extremely easy to pick up, but is highly addictive.
– Real player with 48.8 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
Monster Monpiece
Monster Monpiece is a highly flawed card game that still manages to be enjoyable.
The core gameplay is pretty solid. You get 3 Mana every turn, and you can use this Mana to play one of the cards in your hand (all creature cards) each round, placing it onto a small board. The goal of each battle is to get your monster girls across the board and into the enemy HQ, which will cause the unit to be lost but the enemy to take one point of damage. Typically, three points of damage will defeat your opponent. The enemy AI is extremely stupid and quite predictable, so the game usually compensates for that by giving it superior cards.
– Real player with 82.7 hrs in game
Monster Monpiece, or as I’ve come to call it, maybe another month’ll do it because this game can’t be played all at once without losing your sanity. That’s a bit of a mouthful though, so we’ll shorten it to “unless you really like card games and monster girls, you can skip this one.”
Alright, that wasn’t much better, but my point is this game drags on for way too long for how little depth there is to it. After the first few battles you have basically mastered the game, from there the only thing that changes is getting new cards that do new things that the old cards might not have done, or they do better, or etc etc card game mechanics until you realize two things. Nothing matters but the main stat which is used to summon a card, and that skipping the first few turns has 0 downside and lets you stack your hand to summon whatever you want anyway. Unfortunate first hand draw, didn’t get a 3 mana monster, doesn’t really matter cause next turn you can draw one of those 4, 5, 6 cards anyway. To help you understand, this would be like Yugi summoning Dark Magician on his second turn, it’s really dumb, and it’s how the game is actually played. The second thing you learn that makes almost any other card in the game irrelevant, is that some cards get a + mana bonus, in particular, they tend to give mana when you summon them, and when they are destroyed. Whenever you first get access to a card with this (Nekomata), the game completely changes because you skip your first turn, summon nekomata, she casts her ability to give 3 mana, instantly dies to whatever monster you put her in front of, on your 3rd turn now you have basically 3x as much mana as you would have in any other battle up until this point. From there you stack your deck with Nekomatas, and congrats you have beaten the game. Also don’t bother with healers or buffers, they are just dead weight in comparison to putting another combat ready card on the map that can stand on it’s own, seriously, you might think that’s just a min-max kind of statement, but no really, it just works out like that with how the game is built.
– Real player with 51.0 hrs in game
Shadowplay: Metropolis Foe
Shadow play: Metropolis Foe is Turn based Cyberpunk rouge like deck builder game set in virtual metropolis with a band of virtual rebels at a time with alternating play styles to learn and master. Character specified card development are veiled as reflected in the games numerous unlisted None Achievements with quite a deep learning curve.
Level are choice based as your progress depends on the chances you take with random encounters and numerous ways to progress and build your deck and optimise your items and support skills for the end game boss.
– Real player with 41.7 hrs in game
Cost the price of a movie ticket and lasted 10 times as long. If you enjoyed Slay the Spire, you will enjoy this game, two arcs completed, rewards give replay value, but unfortunately it has been abandoned. So it is incomplete. Still I enjoyed it enjoyable and a game experience worth having/ recommending. Hope the devs will complete it one day or make a similar game again.
– Real player with 29.1 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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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