Good game, but not for casual players. Not saying its a bad game by any means, just saying I don't recommend it for others. By all means this game is very impressive, but the majority of players will not get mileage out of this game. The game is very original in its premise and I enjoy the novelty and difficult style of gameplay in macro and especially micro decisions making combat encounters have a surprising amount of depth and strategy for a roguelike deckbuilder, which I enjoy. The problem is not the difficulty by itself, it is the way the difficulty escalates that is extremely unbalanced. The RNG problems do not show how problematic they really are until you decide to play on venturer mode and above.

The game lacks guiding design. The revamped difficulty makes the floor lower where any strategy can work but there is no reference point for what the best strategy is for higher difficulties so you may learn bad habits early on that do not scale well and this makes the difficulty curve seem extremely steep for people trying to learn on their lonesome. There is obviously an intended way to play the game, but what that is is incredibly difficult for the casual player to guess. This means practice with no guidance or reference point will not necessarily help the player improve as they may just be reinforcing a misguided habit as it originally served them well enough early on when it worked.

Because of this, average players are locked out of significant content in the form of the secret last boss. Many roguelike game designers assume locking significant content behind significant difficulty feels only rewarding to dedicated players, but what they are missing is that it feels very punishing and discouraging to players who don’t want complete mastery over the game in order to experience everything it has to offer, Especially when there is so much RNG involved. And this is why I say the game is not for casual players. This is evident in the fact that the achievement rate for beating the true final boss is woefully low.

The rng is barely mitigateable. You cannot plan ahead due to the complete lack of an overworld map, and in venturer mode encounters feel like having your choice between peeing a grape or pooping a melon when you suddenly never have enough food unlike the difficulty just before it. You cannot strategically conserve foods in order to guarantee you'll tame the creatures you need to win the next encounter because the only information you are presented with is what’s immediate.

Tamed creatures also don't replenish to full health for some reason, which means after using a food to tame it, you need another to heal it. You might just end up sacrificing more than you gain, even if the creature you tamed is stronger than the rest of your deck. There are the herbs that heal and can’t tame, but these are very rare and also very ♥♥♥♥♥♥ and heal as much as a food given to a creature that wouldn’t even prefer it, so why not just let me start with more food? At the challenge level I was playing on, I started with only one of each food, which completely screwed me over at the second encounter. I have no idea if I am supposed to tame creatures in the first encounter or not, but the game would lead you to believe that you should, because that's what the entire premise is about. Not only that, but most creatures are never worth taming no matter what, with the creatures you do tame serving as sacrifices, which makes the game very unlike a Deckbuilder and more like a party builder with most of your party being a suicide cult. I would rather go-wide strategies scale just as well as go-tall strategies but when creatures stop replenishing health between battles it just becomes entirely unviable to build a modestly sized team of creatures that synergize with each other leaving you with no other option but to have a couple win conditions that are individually powerful.

After more experience, realizing when you’ll be climbing an impossible uphill battle against attrition or snowball to victory becomes very apparent early on. Not getting the creatures you need early on makes you less powerful than you could be for the next encounter, which means you need to take less risks, which give less rewards, and so on and this compounds until you are completely unprepared for the boss and effectively dead before the fight even began. And this can all happen due to what foods you will have access to and what creatures are presented to you at the very beginning of a run. Starter decks you can assemble are also incredibly unbalanced, with there always being a clear best choice you may or may not have access to, which means you will start the game with a significant advantage or disadvantage, which is very unfair. I think this could be fixed by introducing different starting decks to choose from much like choosing a cruiser in FTL.

You can give a creature its favorite food to guarantee a tame, but only when they are at one health. This works great early game when attacks do one damage but scales badly when creatures start to have lots of health and everything does lots of damage. Trying to tame a creature above one health is not viable either except for rare circumstances, because a gamble having a non-guaranteed success rate might as well be a 0% chance in a roguelike. There is even an achievement for succeeding a tame with <10% odds, and one for failing a tame with >90% odds (that a whole 10% of players got screwed over by) which says a lot about the true design philosophy of this game. Having player input give a random output baked into the very premise and core gameplay loop is a huge no-no, and I found this decision quite striking and odd when I first played. This could potentially be bandaid-fixed by making it so 3 star creatures require 2 or less health to tame, and 4 star creatures require 3 or less health to tame.

Many negative reviews also say that the game feels “unrewarding” and I think its because the games difficulty eventually makes the skill floor and ceiling nearly touch before you’ve even gotten to the final challenge level, with the best plays possible made after long stretches of thinking between turns only managing to keep you just barely afloat for the next encounter in the battle against attrition, your efforts never giving you a significant return that a less-skilled player who can manage to beat the same difficulty as you would otherwise not get. You either play perfect and barely scrape by, or you perish. This would be okay if highest challenge levels weren’t necessarily asking you to engage with them, but they are because the game wants you to collect stars in your bestiary, and of course the true final boss thing.

The bosses have the same problems the ones in Darkest Dungeon 2 have, where different strategies are more or less effective against different bosses or just flat out wont work, but you won’t realize what strategy is best suited until you encounter it after a whole hour of playing at best, unless you want to simply spoil yourself. For example, the first boss is just immune to having the damage-reduction debuff. The bosses can also be misleading, for example the third boss has a secret second phase (and third phase) that it did NOT tell me about, so I threw everything I had with abandon at the first phase and you can probably imagine how that turned out.

If you’re like me and still like the game despite these issues, because after all it is still an overall good game and positive experience, then just play on the lower challenge levels or standard mode and just miss out on the true final boss. The comments are disabled for this review so if anyone is offended by it you'll have to drop off your "1 person found this review funny" at the door and seethe in silence.

Great game, It's like as if Pokemon TCG and Inscryption had a baby and this is what the results were.
Very fun game with tons of monsters/strategies and replayability that can kill time very easily.
I am glad I decided to give this game a try when I decided to purchase it, Even bought it during a sale so I saved a few bucks aswell, so it was a win win situation.

Pretty easy, but fun, game. I beat all 4 missions on my first try, which brings me to the reason why I'm writing this review: according to the achievements 70% of people beat the first boss, yet 6% of people beat a boss on standard mode or higher (so 64% played it on a mode below standard), even though there is only one difficulty mode below standard mode. Now you're probably wondering what this mode does. Well, it makes your creatures immortal. Why did the overwhelming majority of people that played this game turn on immortality mode? Where's the fun in that? You might as well just watch a Youtube playthrough at that point. Shame on those people for thinking that they beat the game and shame on the devs for adding such a mode in the first place. Have some creative integrity.