The Simulacrum

UI looks ugly as hell

Ai art

[h1] Veteran digital boards game player reviewing this! [/h1] Similar to [i]Magic The Gathering! (colours and mana with their archetype of creatures and spells).[/i] What makes this special is the fact that your cards become stronger and change/get abilites over time. And it's completely randomized - you won't get the exact same cards as me. The fun lies in building powerful combos and going as far as you can in a roguelike run - all cards you earn, you keep forever. [i]People are complaining about a missing tutorial![/i] This is true! But just look up the 3-minute explanation guide in the guides section and you are ready to go. In fact, after just one run, you will understand the game - it's really not hard, just overwhelming on the very first glimpse! You can meta-game pretty complex decks though, if you want. It certainly would be boss in a multiplayer game - which this also has! [h3] Achievements [/h3] very easy. I got 40% on my first run. After that I created a brutal deck on second rogue run and then stomped all Boss fights with that deck. [h3] Game Hint [/h3] [spoiler] A red pyro deck with lions will get you through all bosses. [/spoiler] [h3] Verdict [/h3] If you like games where you think strategies and also like to play solo and slow (think: Gloomheaven or Spirit Island), this is the game for you!!!

Overall an incredible cardgame that forces you to rethink your strategy after every game and during every fight, which however has some major bugs like nodes being not clickable or the game softlocking - which can destroy a whole run. If those issues were fixed, I'd say this might even outclass Slay the Spire, Monster Train and Across the Obelisk.

DESPERATELY needs a tutorial. There is a lot going on in this game, and very little of it is actually explained to you.

This might be my first review for a game, but this is an extremely underrated gem so thought it was worth doing! For lovers of games like Magic, Hearthstone's Dungeon Runs, Slay the Spire, and card games in general, this is a very fun entry into the genre. For the cost, there is a surprising amount of depth! The basic gist of the game is that there are infinite procedurally generated cards which you can use to form decks with effects that vary from laughably bad to insanely strong. When you load in to the tutorial (which is probably the only bad thing I have to say since it doesnt really explain anything, and it took some playing to learn various mechanics -- see the basic guide written by the dev instead) and complete it, you are presented with a few different modes. Delve, Draft, Gauntlet, and Boss Battles. Delves are the core of the game, in typical roguelike fashion you beat enemies on branching paths as you find and modify cards, and once you complete a delve you unlock the cards in your collection forever. These cards can later be used to battle Bosses. Although you will repeatedly unlock cards that could seemingly win the game on their own, and can form a deck of 30 such cards, Bosses still provide a reasonable challenge level and you often have to specifically make (or at least edit) decks to beat certain bosses, not just auto-sending the same deck over and over. The Gauntlet and Draft modes are fun in their own ways, but there is little meat on those bones compared to Delves and fighting Bosses which are extremely fun. I think if the game suddenly became popular Draft would actually have a lot of depth and replayability, but as is there are not enough players queuing to make it happen. Overall, if you read this far, I think you can be convinced to part with a few dollars for many hours of fun. The cherry on top is that the devs are responsive and if you run into a bug, they are quick to address it -- the thing that prompted me to finally write this review was that the devs were able to apply a fix to a problem I posted on the discord within just a few hours. Highly reccomend!

Not nearly enough replayability for how ambitious it is, but more than enough to pay for itself many times over. The actual free-play deckbuilding feels meaningless when you set the difficulty for your gameplay with a constructed deck yourself, would be a much improved game with a ranking per deck and repeated opponents at an adjusted difficulty. Draft (delve) is where replayability lies, but you face the same decks too often, the same cards even. Not something that should be encountered in a game about procedurally generated content, but I guess a choice was made to avoid too random difficulty. Game is worth it just for another card game to learn the inns and outs of, and the procedural generation adds a bit of novelty on top.

Edit: There is a game breaking bug introduced at some point that can completely wreck your runs. Until that gets fixed, I cannot recommend this game any longer. Let the buyer beware. Original Review: The game is weird and wonderful and worth it at 4 times the price. The gameplay is mostly a delving system that generates a deck for you, and then creates additional cards as you go through a decision tree to fight battles, meet odd encounters which may mutate your cards, and eventually face off against three bosses. Even after defeating these, you can continue on an infinite journey as the challenge ramps up. The card generation results can be truly strange: some useless, some useful, and some broken. The art is crazy, the text can be slightly dense, but you can build some very fun decks out of all these pieces. There are some other modes: there are bosses you can fight in order to unlock them for future delving, single games vs. the computer, and there are a couple PvP modes (1v1 and draft). Note that unless you have a friend to play against, multiplayer is probably not happening. Hoping we see more solo content in the future!!

Horrible and clunky game, Even if you like deck-builders avoid

I played an old facebook card game called warstorm for a while and this operates pretty similarly. I was able to soft lock the game by trying to check out the multiplayer mode then simply hitting back to menu which got the game stuck in an infinite load. the UI absolutely needs some feedback work. most things are very static with no highlighting or raising \ lowering of buttons, outlines, shading, nothing to give a sense of depth and movement. you wont even know the game is frozen until you click a picture and wait a second for the screen to change. and this could all be forgiven if the game wasnt 8.94 GIGABYTES.... how?....why? I could see maybe this was a game with some effort to get it on mobile but with a nearly 9gb footprint that doesn't seem like the case anymore. if the install size was like 1/8th of what it is now, the UI had a little more response \ tactile feedback to it and some bugs were fixed I could then recommend the game but it feels like its still in project editor mode where the bathwater is shipped out with the game for some reason.