Blessed To Die

I like that the game doesn’t try to copy other card roguelikes. Instead, the developer clearly went for a more complex and unique direction, which makes it stand out. It has a strong atmosphere, solid core systems and interesting ideas in both combat and progression. The hero and tavern recruit systems feel meaningful and there is a good sense of overall structure in how runs progress. Combat is a bit unusual at first because of the planning-based approach, but it adds a different kind of tactical thinking once you get used to it. There are still areas that could be improved, especially around clarity and readability in combat, but the foundation is strong and full of potential. I would recommend giving it a try!

Honestly been having a great time with this game. It’s a really solid mix of roguelite and tactical strategy, and every run feels tense without overstaying its welcome. There’s always that feeling that one bad decision can completely screw your party, which keeps things exciting the whole time. I also like that the combat actually rewards thinking ahead and positioning instead of just mindlessly rushing enemies. The fights can flip from “okay I got this” to praying for a revive card to pop before the downed guy takes a permement injury, and that’s honestly where the game shines. Once you start figuring out enemy patterns and finding good synergies between characters, it gets super addictive. I kept wanting to do “one more run” just to try a different setup or see if a new combo would work better. The atmosphere is really good too. The music especially does a lot of heavy lifting during fights and makes certain encounters feel way more intense. The whole dark fantasy vibe comes together really well without feeling overdone. Also gotta give credit to the devs for actually staying active with updates and balance changes. You can tell they care about improving the game and listening to feedback, which is great for an indie title. And there’s more depth here than just the combat. Building up your village and experimenting with different team comps adds a ton of replayability. Unlocking upgrades and discovering busted combinations feels really rewarding, and it keeps progression satisfying even after failed runs. Overall, it feels way more unique than a lot of indie roguelites I’ve played lately and definitely stands out if you’re into strategy games with high stakes and a darker atmosphere.

If you like deck building games, you need to give this game a try. I have played dozens of deck-builders over the years, and this one has a truly unique combination of genres. I have enjoyed every minute of the game thus far. The game builds upon all the classic deckbuilding mechanics, like path choices, elites, card upgrades and items/relics. However, it does a great job of differentiating itself from any other deck-builder I've seen. It remind me of darkest dungeons in its squad-building RPG elements and tactics. Instead of playing as one character each run, you assemble a squad of up to three characters from about a dozen different classes that you have freshly recruited or trained run after run. Every character has a unique and ever changing deck, but their cards are shuffled together and shared between characters. This makes every run unique, even if you are running it back with the same team each run. Highly recommend for anyone interested in deck-builders, if only to see a unique game in a market filled with copycats.

I really like everything about the game, it feels a little like darkest dungeon in deck builder form. There's a lot of work to be done with the game still, not everything is fleshed out, certain things aren't explained, whether a mechanic is in or not yet isnt clear, ect. But I've also put 160 hours into it, really enjoyed it, and like giving feedback to make it better.

Great mix of deckbuilding, tactics, and roguelite mechanics.

EDIT: The last update has fixed most of the technical issues for me except the video one. The developer also seems to be working on the other issues mentioned. This massively improves my estimation of the current state of the game, and I can recommend buying it, but due to currently broken balance and missing core features (raids) I would still wait a few updates till playing. Also, steam demands I enable Steam Guard to comment or discuss, which I will not do, so I can only react via review or PM. -------------------------------------------------------------- Original review: This game has some excellent core concepts, but I think it is in a state that is too early in development even for early acess. I have permanent freezes every other time my heroes return to base, choices during adventures can not be made because windows open behind other windows that can not be moved or closed, and balancing is not just early acess levels of bad, but outright like nobody even considered it, with upgrades often hurting you as unlocked classes and rare skills are inferior and dilute the recruit pool. The good things first: - The concept of having a pretty standard medieval fantasy turn based deck builder (it feels like e.g. Darkest Dungeon, with a bit of deck building added on) but with both you and the enemy comitting to actions in advance that then resolve in the order of initiative works beautifully. Most enemies do what an experienced gamer expects them to do, so even if you encounter a new enemy your guess will often be accurate, with assasins and ranged attacking your squishy backline, etc. Good stuff, and it feels awesome when you manage to perfectly to counter an attack you guessed right despite having not encountered the enemy before. - The variety and the upgrade pathes are nice per se. You have a ton of classes, and every individual hero you can recruit has a random subset of skills from all those possible for the class, and those are hard to replace, so you are really happy e.g. to find a monk with the ability slots filled with multi target damage even if he rolled bad stats, because stats increase naturally over adventuring, and replacing skills is slow and you loose out on stat increases for it. On the other hand, you might take an useless monk with terrible cards with you if he has high stats because you can use him as trainer afterwards, where his stats (and only his stats) improve the stats of all future heroes of his class. Really nice tradeoffs here, also in theory the permadeath is suitably punishing. I have played quite a while and (I think) seen a good chunk of the availiable content, and as you progress through different regions the enemy, item and skill variety is really good especially for early acess at this price point. The random per quest and per hero blessings can really force you vary your playstyle, which is great, but only early game (see below). - I like the art style. The neutral: - Right now you almost only fight and build, which is ok for early acess, but I think the game would really gain from a bit more story. At least every new region should have a bit of flavor text of why you are there. The random encounters do feel like "pick your tradeoff" but do not have enough description to be something really happening to a party of heroes on their quest to save the world. Probably planned for full release, thus here in neutral. The bad: - Technical problems: very frequent freezes, windows that open behind other windows (so you can not click continue and only return to base, which leaves the dungeon uncleared), even the short "video" sequences at the beginning and at important story points throw placeholder pictures insted of running correctly. - Balancing is nonexistent. Not early acess and in need of polishing bad, but fundamentally flawed bad: more damage than an endgame boss has health on your first hero's attack ability card, endgame abilities that are much worse in general and often situational, upgrading building hurting you, and single hero type parties being straight up better for most of the game than balanced ones. In detail: You have abilities that do 1x DEX to a single enemy or less than half DEX to a row. You also have abilities that do 0.5x(DEX)² or INTxWIS to a single enemy or 2.2x WIS to all heroes. Considering that even your early heroes can have like 15 in DEX on a really good roll, and DEX decides who goes first, you can - even on custom difficulty with everything set to max - kill the very last bosses before they can act with basically a starting hero. With the monk WIS to area damage or fireballs on wizard one can just nuke all enemies before they ever get to act with a hero more typical for the endgame. That makes the game loop boring after you get going. There is no need for balanced parties, just pick 3 monks with only one needing to have high DEX and WIS and the others just good skill cards to make sure you have always one such card on your starting hand and can nuke everything. Same works with Wizards and fireball, and sure a few others. As most cards can only be played by their class and the fact that you need trainers per class type to get really high starting stats reliably in recruits, you are actively discouraged to mix and match, as no good mixture with added defense/heal/debuff can compete with a single class high initiative damage squad, that just kills all bosses on turn one on max difficulty. In general, a good game should profit from mixed squads as it introduces more complexity, which equals more fun than just fireball first being the universal solution to everything. I do not mind that there are weak abilities to dilute the strong, but the strong scale way too hard, and are common instead of rare, so having unlocked rare classes and abilities weakens your recruit pool. The "late game" classes offered by maxing out your respective training building are at least for wizard and cleric buildings worse than the early ones, e.g. paladin just does the same damage situationally the monk does every time. As such the best strategy seems to do a) one building one class and b)keep building level low (1 trainer) and advisors away to not dilute your pool of monks or wizards with their common "nuke everything before an enemy can act" cards with late game classes and rarer skills. At least make the good abilities and classes the ones you unlock via advisor and high level buildings, e.g. switch wizard and psion or monk and paladin. Conclusion: Wait for some bugfixes and some serious balance overhaul. If this happens and the story is fleshed out a little I can recommend the game even at a much higher price point, and will update this review accordingly. This feels like it will be a really good game some day, but it should really not be in early acess yet, It feels like there was no testing of core elements at all, even by the developer. For most games I played, even demos published before early acess feel like further along the development pipeline than this game is. Right now it is just frustrating to play with all the freezes and unclickable windows and the balancing leading to a situation where you just kill every enemy before they can act, thus I advise against buying, just wishlist and wait.