I've never reviewed any games previously, but this one really activated something in me. I dumped 54 hours into the game after buying it on a whim, and went through the entire story. I'll mention some notes about the story in this, but will avoid any spoilers or huge notes, but if you like games like Darkest Dungeon or Slay the Spire, this game is the love child of those games and genres with an anime cliche facade (that is story relevant), and is 100% worth a purchase.


The moment to moment game play is a process of planning out which stops to hit within a level and choosing between various rewards to get the strongest team composition to face the final boss/es. Unlike a Slay the Spire, the level is almost completely open, with combat blocking off some paths, making order important as activating an event gives you a choice of 2 options, but you only need to choose an option, not activate the effect immediately. IMO it's practically stupid to not finish the entire level as each combat gives a currency that is used to level up your party members giving them higher stats and more skill cards, and each stop gives you a completely optional choice of rewards.

Combat itself is much more in depth over other deckbuilders as you'll have to learn multiple mechanics for basic play alone, then boss or character specific gimmicks on top of that. The combat at base plays like Darkest Dungeon with enemies having different speeds of attack, except the player's turn is a single consolidated turn instead of per character. There are exchanges to swap drawn skills with a new one, and you can choose to delay a turn using the "Standby" action which works like exchanges as limited use "mana" separate from normal actions. Each character also has a "Fixed Ability" which is an ability YOU CHOOSE AT ANY TIME, with them being always able to be played regardless of the cards in your hand. The biggest mechanical change to get used to though is playing a card or Fixed Ability gives party members "Overload" which increases the cost of following abilities from the character who played it by 1 each card played. This means if you try to play a series of cards from the same character you have to take into account the increasing costs, lest you run out of mana before playing what you need.

Separate from skills, there is equipment and relics you can get from chests that buff your characters with increasing rarity giving new abilities and buffs. You can equip 2 items per character and change at any time, unless an item is cursed which prevents it from being removed when placed on a character. Relics are larger buffs and are analogous to Artifacts from Slay the Spire increasing debuff rates to adding background buffs. Note: Relics can only be equipped after Boss fights on each floor, and having them in your inventory DOES NOT give the effect.

Team composition is a huge importance with 7 DPS, 6 Tanks, 5 Supports, and "2" Special Characters all playing differently and needing different allies to synergize with. A combination with is absolutely broken is Ironheart (Tank), Hein (DPS), Leyrn (Support), and Pressel (Support) as Ironheart's ability is getting extra shielding from healing while his abilities scale from total shielding on all units. Leryn applies shielding which then turns into healing, and with an extra basic healer of Pressel, Ironheart can deal 100s of damage with a single ability and nuke bosses. Hein synergizes against many enemies with a gimmick of taking damage to deal damage as well as a passive when killing an enemy, half the damage of the killing blow is hit to another enemy, which can activate the same passive again.

TL:DR - Darkest Dungeon style rounds with Deckbuilder drawing and card playing. Look up good party combinations and card choices if stuck, and READ THE PASSIVES AND CARDS otherwise you will be so confused why one character works completely different than another.


Honestly, this story is all over the place in terms of tone and content, but the main non-spoiler through line is there is a group of wacky anime cliche caracatures (Otaku Swordsman, Tsundere Goth, Chunibyo Edgelord, E-Girl, Knight, etc...) who comprise a team of investigators who aim to fight to reset/break a time loop by killing a big bad evil knight in a big tower. This group is always led by the main character Lucy who is an amnesiac that remembers none of her time before the loop but is the one "destined" to place a Time Disk built from shards obtained in the playthrough on a Clock Tower to "break the loop". It's fun to learn more about the motivations of characters in each run, but be warned, it quickly shifts from upbeat and quirky to borderline depressing as overarching story beats take place. There are large twists and elements of story you need to keep up with to understand later parts. The next section briefly touches on some of that story, medium spoiling, so I highly recommend you play for yourself if any of this sound interesting and not spoil it.

Spoiler Territory:
What is understood early on into learning about the secrets and background of the loop is that a catastrophic event around black fog forced the inhabitants to be stuck in the "Arc Project" (the loop) which supposedly protects the inhabitants from the outside. This is more and more abstracted as we learn about the characters and their motivations and start to feel like something is wrong. The first win shows that there are characters that know the loop is taking place, and know more than they are letting on, and into spoilers, quickly it's found out that the loop itself is a "computer simulation". All the members in the Ark are avatars of a simulation, with their real bodies in the real world in cryo-sleep. And here's where the quirky and upbeat facade quickly goes away. As characters start to understand and explore the concepts of the world being a simulation, there are many moral and ethic questions that come up, and MAJOR SPOILER: gets very close to the concepts and ideas of SOMA. If you have played SOMA or have seen the important story beats, you will understand the ethical and moral twists/questions of this story.


The music bangs, the combat is fun and engaging, the story is genuinely thought provoking and tugged my heartstrings as an amazing fusion of rougelike and deckbuilder genres. The animation and visuals are top notch anime art styled right out of a comic book, and that only comes with some caveats/notes from my experience:

There's very little information online about the later story choices or needed steps to reach the "multiple" endings. If you want to 100% it, you will need to look things up, and search.
Runs last very long with multiple times my 1-2 hour runs got nuked due to a single misplay that got my entire team wiped in one go on NORMAL. If you don't have the time or patience to sink into comically high amounts of runs, there are mods on the Workshop for quality of life like "Battle Restart" and "Skill Predict Plus" which are SO worth it. Battle Restart allows you to start a fight from the beginning and means your run isn't just instantly dead, although you have to be able to pause to activate it meaning if animations are playing that would nuke your team, it's already over. Skill Predict Plus gives much better predictions of how much damage or healing an ability will do, and I'm fairly certain it also visually tells you when an ability will Crit that isn't normally present.
Lastly, the save and load system is very odd with only specific levels and the safe zones between them (after boss fights) having podiums that you can save and exit the game at and there are mods to fix that feature. If you exit the game at any point within a level, you just lose all the progress and start from the beginning of the level, so pausing or coming back to the game can be stunted sometimes if not played in one go.