Not quite hitting the roguelike card game fun notes.

The art is great, the story is blah, the sounds, the vibes, everything about this game is very well done.

Unfortunately the gameplay and card mechanics are not quite there.

This isnt a deck builder so much so as a deck bloater. There is no card removal mechanics and you can only skip 5 card rewards, Youre going to get about 20 or so card rewards so your deck is going to be heavily bloated with often non synergy cards.

The way this game plays then is more of a turn to turn basis. Every step is reacting to RNG rather than being able to plan anything out.

The pathways you take is hidden behind 3 decks, so where you end up is RNG and often it can be incredibly frustrating for going through a path and hitting say 3 monster fights in a row.

Its RNG to hit a gas station to make sure you can continue onwards, its RNG to upgrade a card (it picks a random card in your deck), its RNG the first couple fights (could be really manageable or you end up losing half your health in the first fight or expending nearly all your resources).

The game is punishing at start and everyone is going to tell you to tough it out and get the upgrades and of course unlocks will make the game easier, but it still bloats the rng pool of cards and relics and items and really all it is doing is... making the game harder to plan for and more tedious. And I also dont think this is a very good argument for experiences. The game should be fun from the start and the grind should be fun. I dont want to grind out unlocks and upgrades so that the game can get fun and I can then start to play with interesting cards. The interesting cards should be interesting, not necessary to progress because you end up in larger and larger pools of RNG to make something work.

If youre looking for a deck building experience where your agency matters, its not here in this game. The starter decks have bloat and minimal synergy and only provides a direction. You can pick everything to enhance that direction, but the difficulty of the monster ramp ups in this game punishes you for optimal play.

Its one thing to make a bad deck and fail, its another to pick the cards that are obvious for the decks you start and be punished HARD for doing so. The beginner experience is not fun, and the slog through the early unlocks is really not fun.

You also average 3 energy. There are very few ways to get additional energy, I am 50% unlocked through at 8 hours and I havent seen anything that gives energy consistently to bump that up.

This means card balance is EXTREMELY lop sided. Since you average either 3 energy a turn, or 9 if you get the energy relic and engine, cards that cost 2 need to be EXTREMELY efficient to be worth using, and often they are not. Most 2 cost cards do not do more than casting 2 basic defends, or do less damage than 2 basic attacks.

There doesnt feel like a lot of testing or balancing was done in Act 2-3. Act 1 feels really polished and the difficulty feels good at any level of unlocks. But 2 has wild swings and brutal punishments.

If you are looking for a Monster Train, Vault of the Void, or STS experience, this will prove to be frustrating as you dont get a lot of agency. I want to like this but its just not fun right now, your player agency doesnt seem to exist.

The game in its current state is way too hard, there are many unbalanced mechanics. This is my experience from Act I and the first character, the detective.

- You are forced to prolong fights to upgrade cards, since they get upgraded from X uses. This turns into spamming defensive cards to upgrade all your cards in fights.
- If you get unlucky you just run out of fuel at the start of Act II. Your fuel doesn't refill at the start of the act, neither does your/your companions health.
- Your dog companion is dead for good once it dies. You don't choose what actions it takes, its random. You cannot reliably defend this companion, if enemies stack attacks on it, its guaranteed to die.

UGH :(

Looks good so far, all the mechanics are familiar for deckbuilder roguelikes. Interesting system to choose encounters via cards. "Tutorial" should have been shown step by step while playing the first turns, instead of just a wall of text as the first thing a player sees. Also dragging cards needs to be too accurately targeted, which is quite annoying. E.g. self cast cards still need to be dragged exactly onto the player, even though there's no possible other target.