A masterpiece, nonpareil in a very specific niche.

People have been coming up with clumsy solitaire dungeon crawlers based on the physical 52-card playing card deck since at least the birth of Dungeons and Dragons (and probably before). I've read the rules of a lot of those and played a couple runs of a few. They're all pretty mediocre, but for some reason it seems to be a fascinating design trope for countless amateurs who think "if I could just get this right..."

This game gets it right.

Yes, it's fair to compare this to modern roguelike deckbuilding video games like Slay the Spire (although strictly speaking the core story mode is not a roguelike, and barely a deckbuilder), but actually that gets the etiology backwards. This game revisits an earlier branch on the evolutionary tree, but carries back the lessons and innovations of modern titles into the classical frame, simplifying and refining them with a view towards elegance and restraint which typifies classic board and card games, and presents them with the class of a hidebound edition of Homer from a fine press publisher.

If you're already sold, a word of caution: the game unfurls very slowly (which seems to be a theme in Triple B. titles), so it's easy (if you are cynical) to dismiss out of hand the early gameplay, which is somewhat mushy and oversimple, and miss the big picture. This would be a mistake. On top of that, many of the modes, difficulties, and other goodies are completely invisible in the UI until you've unlocked them, which further serves to obscure to the beginner just how much there is to do (it's a lot).

The game is paced so that once you've unlocked everything and played for perhaps hundreds of hours, you'll still discover new combinations, optimizations, and ranking (speed) techniques. But you also have a lot of choice, so if you want to completely ignore certain classes, modes, difficulties, and ranking, you can just casually enjoy the refreshingly literate flavor of the austere symbol-laden fairytale story, energetically and professionally voice-acted with pleasingly whimsical illustrations, while playing a few diversionary hands with the simplest starter deck on easy mode. Even if you only did one run to read the story in this most superficial way, ignoring the 90% of the game that remains, you'd still be getting a great deal.

And it all retains the aesthetic context of sitting alone at a table with a deck of cards, which puts the player in a headspace of quiet imagination rather than anxious consumption. One gets the impression this is how Carl Conrad Coreander might have busied himself late at lonely night in the backroom of his bookstore.

I could go on gushing. This game will appeal to a wide spectrum of players, but if you are the kind of person who collects playing cards for their beauty, and sits around imagining new solitaire variants, you owe it to yourself to pick this game up at any price.

It's OK? Maybe I need to complete all the content to get to that "wow" moment, but I haven't had much of a "wow" yet.

Putting together a tiny engine is neat, but it does remain tiny. The number of choices seems relatively small, compared to competing games. Hands are small. Runs are short. There does not seem to be enough there there for things to come together, although maybe there is more after you grind to level 30 in a class or tackle the later campaigns. If you like bite-sized gaming: this operates in very small units before you reset into a next run.

You may expect a poker game. This is not that. Poker hands are used (but not two pair), but there are not enough cards in your hand to do anything Balatro-like. GIven how quickly cards flow into and out of your hand, they are more like dice you are rolling.

You may expect a roguelike deckbuilding dungeon-crawler. This is mostly not that. It is rogue-lite, not rogue-like, meaning you unlock and advance between runs (and at least as much between runs as within). There is a card-based mechanic for upgrading within runs, kind of like getting artifacts/relics in other games, but interestingly from a fixed pool per level. The game is constructed deck with (almost?) no deckbuilding within runs. Each campaign is a fixed set of forks in the road.

This has a lot more writing than most comparable games. It is fully voice-acted. If you are looking for that, the witch will in fact read her text to you.

The interface is fairly poor. There are a variety of minor issues and inconveniences, like what is *not* shown on menu screens and needing to wander around the between-game menu screens to upgrade. Within runs it seems pretty sufficient.

Maybe there is a "wow" if I keep unlocking things and leveling them up, but nothing really grabbed me in the first hours of playing. This is a crowded market in which I find myself more compelled to try another run in a more exciting game than to explore this one further in hopes that it sparks.

Great game, lots of content