While the graphical design is a little bland and sepia-toned, I felt like I had to err on the side of a 5-star review for some of the most strategic, mechanically intensive play I've seen in a while. While it's a tactical deckbuilder, the overall flow and feel is quite different from Slay The Spire. While some games try to do StS but sort of fail, this succeeds at being different. Aside from it clearly being a party TBS on a hex grid, there are other general flow-of-game differences: Infinites are harder to come by, you receive temporary dead cards when reshuffling, specific class cards are usually easier to come by, and your characters have equipment slots based on the character, which each accept one of two types of gear, granting more cards. Willpower (WP) plays the role of "energy" here. You start turns with 0 WP, and you can discard to produce movement, energy, or block, and each character can retain one card for next turn if desired, or a character can redraw a number of discarded cards once in a turn. So a bad draw on Turn 1 can be redrawn or partially redrawn, and discarded again for block and movement in the worst case. Discarding for an effect is, for the most part, a "worse" version of the effect of playing dedicated basic cards, which might produce movement and WP in a single card, for example, but the discard mechanic is very flexible, since you have to adapt to the shuffle luck. In my experience, the food and rest mechanic is fair enough. You have many opportunities to buy food or roll events for a chance of food, and it's usually a strong option up until you're near the limit. (Up to and including Hard at least.) I'm still losing on Hard most of the time and winning Normal only half the time. Deck size is a tricky puzzle because you are penalized for reshuffles, even if deck thinning in the genre is usually quite strong otherwise. Supposedly you can win on Cataclysm levels above and beyond Hard, yikes! Sounds scary. Time to get good?
A+ art B or C for story D for replayability It's really disappointing how little what you do actually matters. There is a sort of ending to the larger story that involves getting one drink "wrong" on purpose, but you're better off just YouTubing for it. Almost nothing else you do matters. I got half the "good" endings even when I tried to mess everything up on purpose. I even sabotaged something in the plot and it somehow fixed itself a few scenes later, with no comment whatsoever. I assume that I just raised my "score" and the plot just jumped rails with no regard for consistency, and that's poor plot branch management. The story, I have to agree with others, is not bad necessarily, but it's not all that interesting, and the characters come across as mostly projections of the devs and people they know who are just like them - struggling writers, game devs, just a bunch of woke 20-somethings doing woke things in their 20s. There's a 4th wall metagame plot that is supposed to keep you replaying, but a second playthrough is disappointing due to how little what you do matters, and it's hard to imagine playing a third time in a short period. The true ending is best gotten through YouTube at that point if you didn't guess the solution to unlock the true ending the second time around (it's a little tricky, and probably not going to happen on the second try without insight and luck at guessing the exact mechanics). Coffee Talk is about as good watched as played, but you can support the devs if you want to for the ok story, and you can go through the gameplay motions and *pretend* that it matters to get a sort of game-like experience.
It's still somewhat early in EA and they tend to add and then fix bugs as they go. I bought the game on Steam EA when it first came out and I hope to own it here eventually. I was skeptical when I saw this game originally in a Facebook ad, but it's not a mobile port of a scammy pay-to-win fake game. It's a legitimate PC fantasy strategy deckbuilding game with several playable characters. It can easily can take 50 or more hours just playing out runs with all the different characters using different primary stats and deck setups. The main downside for me is that you tend to steamroll at the end once find the cheese and go all in, and I hope they address this somehow to make the late game more interesting. There is significant potential for Gordian Quest, and if half-stars existed, I would give it 4.5. The developers have a pretty active Discord where they are looking for suggestions. The game has several characters who can each be built a few different ways or hybrid. The balance is all over the place and late-game thin decks are a bit too powerful right now, so it's not perfect. Some weaker strategies are worth trying for the lulz, even if you already "solved" the game with a reliable cheese strategy. The main adaptation is that specific legendary equipment can't always be fished for so easily, but overall deck composition and size is mostly within reach, some times faster than others. It's not as tense and you don't have to "listen to your draft luck" as delicately as with Slay The Spire, but overall GQ is its own thing. A lot is still in the air and I hope they can achieve hard-but-fair at max difficulty in the end. But it's too early to know for sure. Lower difficulties give you plenty of things to play with, but balance is really unstable right now. I could see my rating tilting to either 4 or 5 stars in the future, but if I'm forced to choose, I'm satisfied enough to give benefit of the doubt here.
There are only three human classes in Missions And Monsters, but monsters are now playable, and you can recruit almost all of them except for the demonic or zombie ones. Monsters can be recruited if you finish a Mission after your second Shrine quest in the main plotline. Each monster has its own unique innate class, which is treated as a base class in which one progresses to unlock the first tier of generic monster subclasses, which are shared by all monsters. A monster chooses TWO subclasses, so that you can have a Deft Sylvan Vangal, for example. You get to choose the Counter ability, but the six passives are locked to the class and chosen subclasses and cannot be swapped out individually. This streamlines things a bit while adding more abilities to the mix. Overall, monsters are pretty powerful, they interact directly with Wrangler human class, and recruiting new monster types also unlocks abilities for the Beastmaster human class. Samurai human class is just its own thing, but their gimmick is gaining bonuses based on having debuffs. Any non-story character can be sent on a Mission from the Guild. They tend to take about 15-30 minutes in the first part of the game, and some can take as many as 5 characters with the right Guild upgrade. 3 missions can run at the same time, so this can grind tons of AP and keep your extended roster busy and really let you try everything faster. The timer runs even after you save and exit, making it... well, Pokemon Idle! You even can turn on AI for all units if you want! lulz. Reloading after starting a Mission yesterday feels good. The AP gain can be pretty comparable to just doing patrols, and vicarious global AP applies as always. There are also some optional extra-large battles with 9 or so allies allowed, rounding out the general feel that having more units is fun. You might even finally learn enough to wrap your head around Bzarro at this rate. No reason to skip if you like Fell Seal already, IMO.
I've only played part of the demo and didn't even finish. It may be a time/patience issue, but there is a genuine pacing problem imo. For example, you have to reveal exploration tiles to recharge heals in the dungeon map. But you're free to stall out fights by leaving one enemy alive and healing/waiting repeatedly, which costs no resources. Meanwhile, animations are just slightly sluggish, the UI is just a little bit clunky, and... it all adds up, so that we're suspended in limbo right there with our fallen heroes. On top of that, you're constantly gaining small amounts of crafting material in the eventual hope of cashing it all in for better gear, while under no pressure to move on, so it tends to stagnate a lot. The learning curve kind of sucks, because the first area starts out a bit hard and then becomes trivial with mild grinding, but this is all while you're still confused, learning, and completely without gear. So it's too hard and then you grind and it's too easy, and maybe eventually you move on when you feel like it... I feel like it could've benefited from diffulty tiers and roguelike farming limitations so you'd have to make hard decisions instead of just grinding a lot. I also ended quest runs by accident, just stumbling around, without being able to close out side-quests. There's also a Rage mechanic that isn't especially well realized. For the three starter characters, I either never used Rage skills, or the good skills cost 1 Rage, which meant I could spam the ability on every turn after the 1st. Not a wonderful twist for making interesting choices, though maybe it eventually gets better, idk. Still, it's laudable for them to have the confidence in their game to give away a substantial free demo. If 5 stars is great and 4 stars is quite good with room for growth or moderate flaws, this still counts as a 3, I guess. I could see buying the full game at $3 or $5 if it ever gets there on sale.
