Good game with an interesting theme. The combat and gameplay is rather simplistic, just being cards in a line but the setting, art, and mechanics all tie the game together in a way that makes you want to keep playing and see more of the story. I might be a bit biased though since the setting of the game is ripped directly off of Made in Abyss, which has some of my favorite worldbuilding ever.

As for the game's faults, the game itself is a bit light on content. Once you finish the main story and there isn't much left to do but try to tame all the creatures but the gameplay gets a bit repetitive after a while. There aren't many elements of the game that add run variability, so you often end up with similar teams. To be honest, even though the game calls itself a deckbuilder, it's not really much of a deckbuilder. There are very few mechanics that interact with the deck and from what I found the ideal deck size was 5-6 cards, which you basically draw out immediately. You can also directly delete cards from your deck at any time as well.

A lot of people mentioned that the game was too difficult but if anything even the highest difficulty (Pioneer) was not that bad in my experience. I ended up playing most of the game on the third difficulty. The game does appear to have a high skill floor and there aren't really any opportunities to catch up if you fall behind so that may contribute to the difficulty. I see that there's an upcoming difficulty rework so things may be different soon.

Best Pokemon game

The artwork and the trailer evokes a sense of exploring some deep, complex world, but the actual gameplay does not live up to this promise. The gameplay really clashes with the tone in a way that destroys the mysterious world evoked by the artwork/flavor text, and while the gameplay isn’t “bad”, it’s not strong enough to carry the game on its own.

The tone seems to suggest that you are exploring some wild, chaotic space, but the gameplay is extremely ridged. The flavor text between fights and delves seems to suggest that your character is supposed to be forming some sort of an emotional bond with the creatures, but if you’re not planning on which half of your deck is going to get ground into expendable meat shields by round 2 you’re not going to make it to round 4. None of the creatures have any sort of unique “flavor” to them, if you separated the card portraits from the creature attacks/stats I would be hard pressed to tell you which went together, this is further emphasized by the fact you’re supposed to take attributes from some of your creatures and add them to other ones. Enemies are grouped in bizarre ways that gives no sense of this being in a cohesive environment, or that any of these creatures have some sort of consistent behavior. I didn’t feel like an explorer diving into the dangerous unknown, I felt like I was playing Temu Pokémon cards in a middle school cafeteria.

As for the gameplay itself…it’s OK. The mix and match powers mechanic is interesting has potential, but I don’t think this game really lives up to that potential. Matches are over really quickly, so if a combo takes more than two turns to set up it’s not worth it because one of the creatures will be dead in three. There are some synergies that can be taken advantage of, but the rouge-like nature of which creatures you can encounter and the limited resources you have to tame creatures means you can never predict at match three what you’re going to have available by match six, making it neigh-impossible to plan out any sort of “build” for your deck. Combine this with the very steep difficulty curve in each run, and I feel like the game punishes players for trying to think of any strategy beyond which creatures hit hardest.