Describing Rose and Camellia Collection as ‘five games in one’ is an enormous stretch. The entire Collection consists of four ‘Scenarios’ plus a bonus crossover with an even more obscure game which you have to enable in the settings to play. 

Each Scenario offers a brief scene-setting narrative, followed by a series of slap battles, culminating in a more challenging boss fight that ultimately doesn’t deviate from the established pattern. There is a local co-op mode, but it also offers very little variety. You can get through the entire game in less than two hours.

The key feature of Rose and Camellia Collection is the slapping mechanic. The turn-based combat sees two characters delivering open-hand slaps to the other’s face until their health is reduced to zero. You jerk your Joy-Con backwards to dodge and swing it to slap. You can feint to trick your opponent into dodging prematurely and ultimately deliver a stronger blow. If an opponent misses, you can counterattack on their turn. 

Occasionally, you can perform a special move to deliver multiple slaps at once, but there’s no clear indication of what triggers this. A couple of characters learn unique attacks, but this happens very late in their stories and you can win easily without ever utilising them. A score in the top corner ticks over as you fight. It has no impact on the game, but it is satisfying to see the number rise. 

Alternatively, you can carry out these moves by swiping on the touchscreen in handheld mode. However, this robs the game of what little novelty it has as there is very little else to the gameplay. Rose and Camellia Collection gets repetitive quickly, making its short run time something of a blessing in disguise.

The plot ostensibly centres on an aristocratic Japanese family. The first two Scenarios see noble women catfighting over the inheritance of their family home. The third sees a teenage maid travel the world battling globally inspired enemies in training to defend the household she will serve. The final canon story sees those women defend their home from hostile noble families from the fractured land.

The atmosphere is excellently generated through its art, with elegant characters over sinister backgrounds. The injuries you deal to your enemies during fights are graphic in a way that is gory yet satisfying. The voice acting in the cutscenes is genuinely fantastic, complemented by an incredible soundtrack that evokes the Victorian Gothic style perfectly.

There is plenty of interesting material here that could have resulted in an epic storyline of familial politics and betrayal. Unfortunately, you don’t spend enough time with any of the characters to connect to them. The cutscenes are short and follow very familiar story beats. Supernatural elements are introduced and offer some intrigue, but they’re never explained or explored.

Some of the writing is genuinely good. It is overall darkly funny. However, these moments are few and far between in an already short and under-developed tale. More often than not, the dialogue makes sweeping, uncomfortable generalisations about women that could have been easily left out.

Rather than a complete game, Rose and Camellia Collection feels like a demo of something much larger and better. There is so much potential for a sprawling exploration of the fractured story world with its class politics and sinister demonic entities. The option to choose the dialogue for your character would give you so much more agency as a player, making you feel more invested in the slaps you throw. A more expansive story would also give your poor arm a rest, as it is very easy to click quickly through every cutscene and just slap for an hour straight.

Rose and Camellia Collection is evidently a game that is not designed to be taken seriously. It is purposefully ridiculous, and at times darkly funny. However, the quality of its writing is inconsistent, and it leans far too much on one gimmick to justify its $20 price tag.

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The gameplay is fairly simple. You travel across the map navigating obstacles in your way by pulling levers, pushing blocks and occasionally using your special ability to summon vines. For the most part, the puzzles aren’t particularly difficult to solve, as the game focuses more on the world.

One Last Breath’s strong suit is the atmosphere. The environments take the form of a somewhat familiar post-apocalyptic planet bathed in a sometimes irritating amount of darkness, but are well generally constructed. The occasional scene that shines a light on the harrowing state of the world and the horrible monsters inhabiting now are brilliantly creepy.

This is complemented by an awesome soundtrack and very satisfyingly chilling sound effects. This is further compounded by the way the Joy-con throb in your hand along with the character’s heartbeat in moments of tension. Some of these little details that have been implemented are really fantastic.

The issues you’re more likely to face are due to slightly clunky mechanics. The controls aren’t particularly precise and it’s not always clear if you’re standing slightly too far away from something you’re supposed to be able to interact with. The set speed at which you travel is also somewhat frustrating. There are points where you need to jump onto something, or flee from or sneak past a monster, and those moments fall flat due to not having control over your speed.

This seems as if the main pain points could be down to the 2.5D structure, which is an ambitious approach that is difficult to pull off. Occasionally, a puzzle will require depth perception, but not frequently enough that you get into a habit of factoring the background into your approach.

It would be nice to see more of the vine mechanic, as the idea of it ties nicely into the premise of the game. This ability can only be used in a handful of specific situations. There are a number of puzzles throughout the game that look like the vine mechanic would be useful where it isn’t the option and you can’t even try. It makes it very clear that there is only one available solution to each puzzle and little room to experiment with the one unique feature your playable character has.

This mechanic could also have been an interesting vehicle to highlight more of the story. One Last Breath is silent, leaving it up to you to piece together the narrative for yourself. This is another common but difficult feat that could be better implemented in this game. There isn’t enough in the landscape or puzzles to distinguish One Last Breath from other generic, post apocalyptic sci fi and make its own plot clear. 

The environmental message and the story of hope in the face of utter destruction in One Last Breath is one that resonates. The depiction of the ruined world is great, with some attention to detail coming through beautifully. However, other details that make similar games shine fall flat in this one, and the story outlined in the game’s description doesn’t come through as clearly as it could in the actual gameplay. For a short, cheap game, there is plenty that is enjoyable, but it is overshadowed by its competition in the genre.

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Not Tonight 2 follows a group of young friends who ring in the New Year with a protest against the government’s oppressive approach to rule. Eduardo Suarez is abducted and dumped in a gulag to be deported within a month unless his friends can find the documents proving his right to stay and deliver them in time to the guards. The group then splits up in different directions to track down his passport and family tree, taking on gig work via door security casual job app Bouncr to afford the costs of the journey.

The gameplay is familiar to anyone who has played Not Tonight, with a simple enough bouncing job kicking off the game to reacquaint you with the rhythm of it. As you progress, the requirements to grant access get more complicated. This begins with the obvious guest lists and other additional factors to look out for. It then escalates to make the gameplay itself more complex, giving you rhythm-based tickets requiring you to click along to the beat. As the game ramps up to its climactic finish, you work the door for an obvious cult and have to decide whether or not to drug their chosen ones.

The narrative is darkly funny and hugely insightful. You follow each of Eduardo’s friends in turn as they set off on different journeys to help him. They head in opposite directions, travelling across the country to find the documentation he needs. On their way, they meet a variety of people impacted by and reacting to the sharp fascist turn the country has taken.

As well as earning money via your Bouncr gigs, you are also rewarded by a mysterious organisation when you engage well with the other characters you meet. Not Tonight 2 puts you in a number of ethically ambiguous situations where you need to make a moral choice about what to do. At multiple points, you have to choose if you’re going to break the rules to help someone you’ve met and care about, whether that means reuniting your uncle from his estranged (but still beloved) ex-wife or allowing someone desperate to get home access to a location from which they’ll be able to smuggle themselves out of the US.

The story is absorbing and profound, pulled together by the strength of the friendship between the core characters. Not Tonight 2 engages incredibly well with the social and political issues facing not just the US, but a lot of the rest of the world right now. It doesn’t feel particularly heavy-handed in its messaging, but also doesn’t shy away from holding the real world accountable. It reinforces the value of community and solidarity in a cruel world, delivering a serious message with a creative, clever and darkly funny plot.

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The key twist in Tamarak Trail is that the deck you build is not made up of standard cards, but rather of collected dice sides. You start off with two dice, populated with the most basic attacking and defensive moves available in the game, as well as one or two more interesting sides based on which character you are playing.

This gives Tamarak Trail a much stronger element of chance than similar games. As well as needing luck when it comes to the sides you find in the first place, there is also the fact that you’ll never have complete control over your dice roll. 

However, this unique feature also opens up new avenues for interesting strategies in battle. The placement of each die side you find can have a huge impact on your combat. Some not only have a direct impact on the battlefield, but are affected by collisions between your dice. Others cause the die to flip, meaning you get the use of a second side of the same die during that turn.

If you are lucky enough to encounter a treasure chest on your route, you can also collect die cores. These offer a variety of boosts when you use them in battle and can be a valuable or even integral aspect of your battle strategy. There is certainly scope to figure out how you can make die sides and cores work together to ramp up your power. On a good run, you can become an unstoppable machine rampaging across the map.

Each time you are defeated, you return to the lodge to start over. Every boss battle you win rewards you with currency called Garmonbozia. This can be used to rebuild the crumbling lodge which acts as your base. Each completed upgrade offers boons to your future runs, although it could be more obvious where exactly they impact the gameplay.

There are three playable characters. You meet one at the very beginning, and the other two you have to unlock with upgrades to the lodge. While their first rolls will utilise the same basic moves, they have different pools of die sides available to them tailored to their characters, resulting in different battle strategies to play with. You mostly see the differences between the three after you’ve collected a decent amount of die sides on any given run. Some of the core mechanics designed to showcase their individual personalities could be more obvious, as it’s usually only on particularly good runs where the distinctions really shine.

The world you explore in Tamarak Trail is a fun fantasy setting, with an interesting range of enemies split into distinct camps, from humanised animals to spectral spirits. The artwork, animation and soundtrack are all stunningly crafted to make the game as a whole a delight to look at as you play.

The description of the game hints at a “malevolent presence” infecting the land, which you need to defeat. Otherwise, there isn’t a lot of story to Tamarak Trail. This isn’t a huge issue, as it is quite fun to piece together the details of the world with each run and to see more of it as you manage to plunge deeper into the trail. While the focus here is evidently on the gameplay, this does leave many interesting narrative elements that are begging to be explored with more depth.

There are certainly elements of Tamarak Trail that it would be nice to see given more of an opportunity to shine. However, the aspects that have been a core focus are very polished, resulting in an addictive game that checks all the boxes for its genre at a reasonable price for the gameplay you get.

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A more story-driven game than the others in the series, Highwater follows Nikos and his ragtag group of friends as they attempt to find a way onboard the rocket headed for Mars. Nikos lives on his rubber dinghy, sailing between the few remaining scraps of land in a world decimated by floods. The gameplay is split into navigating around the drowned map and turn-based combat between you and those who stand in the way of the resources your community needs to survive.

The worldbuilding in Highwater echoes the other games in the series. You piece together the full story of how the world became so devastated through off-hand comments made by radio presenters playing through the story, as well as newspapers and books you find scattered around the world. Through the narrative, you focus on Nikos and the people he encounters.

You meet a wide variety of individuals who have all reacted to the apocalypse differently. The elites of Alphaville have given up on the mess made of planet Earth. Insurgents are furious that the Alphavillians would abandon the planet and so many people left stranded, and incite battles for vengeance. Small groups and even lone individuals exist in their own little worlds, with their own unique approach to surviving. 

There is an enormous community of wholesome, hopeful people around Nikos. They support each other by sharing information and resources. Despite the general understanding that the planet is doomed, they resiliently get on with their day to day lives, raising a new generation to adapt.

You spend a brief amount of time with each person, getting enough of a glimpse into their lifestyle to understand their reaction to the world. They are all incredibly interesting and believably written, with distinct, memorable personalities. The short stretches with new people feel like you’re only scratching the surface of the true depth of the Highwater game world. It’s easy to be left wanting to explore more of the different paths people have taken—to question which avenue you might take under similar circumstances.

The combat is turn-based and requires you to creatively utilize the skills of the different characters journeying with you at the time of any given battle. You can also make use of various features of the environment that add an extra element to your strategy. It’s fairly easy to identify how you can generate an advantage for yourself in most battles, but they still provide a decent amount of challenge.

Initially, the turn-based structure can feel like it loses the urgency generated by the desperation of the narrative. However, this fades pretty quickly. The different types of enemies you face, the variety of environments in which you find yourself, and the ever-shifting makeup of your team results in a genuinely absorbing experience.

Between cutscenes and combat, you sail around the map, listening to the utterly stunning radio soundtrack, chatting to whoever is traveling with you, and watching Nikos reflect on his situation. Highwater is an incredibly introspective and provocative game. It questions the morality of choices you are forced to make when you are desperate. It directly challenges the decisions people with power and influence in the real world make every day, and prophesies a terrifying future.

Highwater ends ambiguously. As you make your way towards your final goal, there is a looming sense of dread about whether it will truly provide Nikos with the “happily ever after” he dreams of. He has left his friends behind in his bid for safety. Whispers in the background cast doubts on the promises made by the powerful. The story concludes still dripping with uncertainty. 

The game, and the parallels it draws with reality, are hard to stop thinking about.

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Its cute, cartoony style and laidback tutorial lull you into the idea that this game will be silly and playful all the way through. Your first task, after all, is to have a pleasant chat with an old lady who you well know is welcome past the gate. However, the story draws you into the political conflict raging within and around your city in a way that engages with some surprisingly mature themes.

Your role at the gate requires you to follow the instructions of three royal advisors who set you tasks with varying degrees of seriousness. One is simply to find someone with a silly name, while others need you to watch out for illegal drug smugglers disguised as pensioners. You are taught early on not to judge a book by its cover and to pay attention to what you are doing.

To get as accurate information as possible from each encounter, you are given a number of crystal-powered tools—including a decoder ring, truth potion and a whip—and up to three actions per conversation. At the beginning of each day, you choose which of the tools to power up with the crystals at your disposal. You can replace crystals you use up with the money you earn at the end of your shift.

One of these actions can simply be to ask questions. You get to choose the attitude with which Lil responds to the answers you are given, with a lot of humor drawn from the option to tease people. A lot of the game consists of this dialogue between Lil and the other characters, which is enormously well written. All the characters have fantastic backstories that build a full and detailed picture of the game world, despite the limited space you have to explore.

You are also given the Chronometer3000, which allows you to rewind time. However, this has limited use, and the crystals that power it are unstable. You can only use it a limited amount if you don’t want it to kill you horribly, and it is best kept a secret from nefarious characters with unsavory schemes.

The Chronometer3000 (as well as being relevant to the plot) comes in handy if you want to ensure you get the best score. The game is split into twelve chapters, each of which requires you to engage with a certain number of people. You are scored at the end of each chapter based on how much information you’ve gathered from each person and how well you’ve engaged with them.

It’s not particularly difficult to figure out who is likely to be untrustworthy. The characters are notoriously bad at disguises and are typically not great liars, either. However, how you choose to navigate your engagement with them—rather than a flat pass or fail rate based on whether or not you allow them entry—can result in different scores. 

You also have the option of playing as an agent of chaos, and simply letting all the liars and crooks run rampant through the city. That is, assuming you can toe the line enough to keep your job and don’t get so embroiled in their antics that you end up dead.

As you talk to more of the local folk, you get drawn into their stories. A goblin uprising is simmering in the back alleys of the city, which those who benefit from the status quo wish to prevent. You can choose to help or hinder their movement. With a royal wedding on the horizon to secure an alliance with a neighboring kingdom and a civil war on the horizon if not, you gain the trust of the Princess who seeks your counsel on pressing matters. You are given the chance to offer an opinion on her nuptial options and to guide her in which of her advisors, both new and old, are worthy of her trust.

Lil Guardsman examines the political plotting and societal issues in an astute and intelligent way. It offers a not-so-subtle allegory through the experience of non-human characters, in which your own father is complicit through the job he does to support his family. The game also explores how small decisions can have a lasting impact on those around you, with some particularly moving scenes giving it a big emotional impact.

While the story beats of the game don’t change a lot, the journey changes drastically based on your decisions and you feel it the whole way through. These details are sprinkled into the game in subtle ways that make Lil Guardsman more profound than it appears at first glance. 

The combination of the cute art style and dark political conspiracy is great fun, with an incredible soundtrack to accompany it. Lil Guardsman plays with the tropes of the fantasy setting and is rich with fairytale-inspired humor. It is broadly kid-friendly, exploring important topics in a manageable way, while remaining delightfully engaging for an adult audience as well.

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The Cub follows on from Golf Club Nostalgia and Highwater from the same developers. Similarly to the previous releases, The Cub uses a playful premise to deliver its very serious message.

You play as the titular cub, a Mowgli-inspired feral child living in the ruins of planet Earth. An opening cutscene explains how he was separated from his mother when most of humanity fled Earth to live on a terraformed Mars. He has since lived on the abandoned Earth, raised by wolves and developing scrappy survival skills to stay alive in the toxic environment.

The game begins when Martians return to Earth to examine the wasteland. They notice the cub and decide to hunt him down and capture him—partly to study how he survived the poisoned air and partly to destroy evidence that the privileged class saved themselves and abandoned vulnerable children. 

From there, you scramble through a gorgeously-designed 2D platformer that takes you from dark subterranean depths to the peaks of derelict skyscrapers with the three invaders in close pursuit. The platforms are wonderfully designed. The blend of overgrown jungle and the detritus of crumbled buildings paints a horrifying picture of a world exploited and abandoned by mankind, rendered unlivable and unloved. 

They also make for fun platforming. The contrasting natural and man-made obstacles clash in a way that makes you think about how best to traverse each section. One particularly delightful level sees you shinny up the handrail and leap over the inverted seats of a wrecked subway car dangling vertically over the edge of a cliff.

As you go, you piece together the history of humanity by collecting emails, videos and newspapers scattered through the ruins. The Cub leaves absolutely no question about who is responsible for the destruction of the planet. Greedy corporations who prioritized profits over the wellness of the world and its human and non-human inhabitants did this. There is a direct line drawn between their actions in their obsession with advancing technology to fit their vision while hoarding as much wealth as possible and the utter destruction of the world.

The Cub is also not subtle about its comparisons with the real world companies and individuals making those exact choices today. A logo emblazoned across the side of lorry corpses littering the world echoes the Amazon logo. An early space travel entrepreneur is named Muskovitch. Some are not the most intelligent pieces of satire, but it’s nonetheless difficult not to chuckle at stories about capitalist planet-destroyer Jeff Bozo.

There are other collectibles you can acquire on your adventure. Some nod towards the influences behind the game. You find books including The Jungle Book, Moby Dick and Candide, and play video clips that echo profound scenes from recognisable apocalyptic film and television.

You also collect experiences that remind you that you’re playing as a vulnerable, lone child. You can dig into the darkest, scariest corners of the map to find luxuries, burps and hugs. These are the moments that remind you just how severely contemporary civilization is failing the next generation. The only moments of affection this nameless child experiences, while being hunted by the very adults who wrecked his home, are from dirty old teddy bears. It’s such a simple but effective way to hammer home the message of this game.

The entire game is accompanied by a truly stunning original soundtrack. Early on, the cub steals a helmet from a dead Martian. Whenever he wears it, you listen to an Earth nostalgia centered radio channel broadcast from Mars. Original songs beautifully accompany each stage of the game and the emotional beats of the story at each point. 

These are punctuated by the gentle, friendly voice of a radio host who offers context about life on Mars. This is not presented as the utopian new world space pioneers dream of. Instead, people call in to tell heartbreaking stories of being separated from their families and hating living in a perpetual winter. The host kindly reminds listeners to take medication to improve their mood and that spreading “misinformation” about rumors of feral children living on Earth is punishable by law.

The Cub is not an especially long game, but it is good fun and incredibly well designed in almost every respect. It combines a terrifying warning with a sense of rebellious whimsy to make an important point clearly and concisely.

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Each map has a number of different kinds of plant and animal life that can thrive there if you manage to restore the appropriate conditions. The tools available to you are tailored to each region and the work required there. Your first task is to purify the poisoned earth so that it is capable of supporting life again. Then, you have to nurture specific habitats to coax wildlife back to the region.

To pass any given map, you have to fully remove the toxins from the earth, fill the biome with set percentages of the different terrains you need to recover, and restore three of the six possible animals that can live there. There are also a number of optional challenges you can meet to boost your score. 

Terra Nil does not hold your hand when it comes to instructing your progress. You are given a handbook with some key facts about the tools you have to use and the plants and animals you are trying to restore. But you have to work out the relationships between them largely on your own.

Some steps may even seem counterproductive. In at least one map, you have to set up certain conditions specifically to burn down huge swathes of woodland so that you can nurture new life in the ashes. It becomes technical and specific and requires you to strategically plan out your choices to reach your end goal without cluttering the map with so many machines that there isn’t space for the full spectrum of biodiversity you’re aiming for.

Once you have completed all four maps, new ones appear in each region. These are trickier, as they come with the same tools you used originally, but often with new problems, as well. You have to think creatively to figure out how you can use only the resources available to you to encourage the right life to flourish in a way that it can exist in harmony. In this way, Terra Nil has a decent amount of replayability. It offers new, randomly generated maps that require different approaches to terraforming with increasing finesse to optimise the necessary balance,

You aren’t given the context behind the destruction of the planet. However, there are lots of clues for you to interpret. While natural disasters could explain the state of each region, it is heavily implied that it is humanity’s impact on the world that has caused such trauma. 

The final level in particular is profound and moving to experience. It is a ravaged city with enormous blocks of concrete that you physically cannot remove, so they remain in the way of your restoration efforts. It is also plagued by toxic gasses that you can only do so much about. At the end of each level, you leave the habitat to exist harmoniously without human presence. In the last one, you leave in a spaceship, indicating that mankind has fled the Earth and finally left it to the creatures that don’t destroy it.

This gives Terra Nil a melancholic sense of hope. A lot of these scarred, barren wastelands are hauntingly similar to manmade disasters that already exist on Earth. The maps you play are a terrifying glimpse into a future that may well await the environment if people, governments, and corporations don’t start taking climate change seriously.

And they take a lot of work and intelligence to fix. While it’s not hugely difficult to get a satisfying map with some effort, it is very hard to 100% restore the possible biodiversity. You’ll likely not restore all six animals to each map because the balance required is so delicate. While 93% is an impressive improvement, Terra Nil makes it clear that fully undoing the damage that humanity has caused to the planet is no easy feat. But if we start taking environmental issues seriously—and soon—it is possible.

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You have to travel the dark sci-fi realm battling minions to gain EXP. Once you have enough, you will be recognised as a Real Person and will be able to control the machines, which are programmed to obey and never harm humans. 

The gameplay in Crymachina largely takes the form of rapid speed fighting. You are quickly taught the key moves that will keep you alive and then thrust into the action. The battles are fast-paced and exciting. 

You do need to master the moves you are taught if you’re going to survive. The enemies you face have their set moves and patterns, but they aren’t as repetitive or formulaic as many games offer. It’s not impossible to button mash your way through the game, but you’ll certainly benefit from quick reflexes and a sense of strategy.

The sheer speed of the movement can make the fights more challenging, especially when the shooting bursts of bright neon attacks don’t differ between you and your enemies. It can be unclear whether you’re landing hits or they are until you die. 

The pace also means you might miss some information that is revealed during fights. Characters speak during the fights, but only in Japanese, so it’s difficult to read the translated text. Crymachine, however, offers difficulty options that allow you to choose a less brutal battle level so you can focus on the story.

In between fights, you return to Eden, where the characters guiding you through your journey gather and recover. Here, you can power up your character by assigning skill points earned during battle, as well as record information you’ve gathered about the world and save your game.

There is a lot of dialogue in these sections made up of interesting discussions about life and purpose and what it means to be human. The different characters have contrasting perspectives on the point of being alive, raising questions about what to do with the precious few years we each get to experience consciousness.

The darkness and solemnity in the conversations are balanced out by a darkly charming sense of humor. Wry gallows humor and the occasional meta joke lighten the mood. These jokes are delivered by well-written characters that create a great sense of community. 

Their understanding of human concepts like “family” is sometimes flawed in a way that makes for wholesome characters who are working as best they can with the limited information (and zero personal experience) they have of such things. Without being too forceful of its message, the game makes you think about the things we in today’s world – perhaps one teetering on the brink of a similar violent extinction – may take for granted.

These sections take the form of a visual novel more than they do cutscene. They can take some time, although there are a number of optional scenes you can choose not to play. You are also not offered any dialogue options with which to reply. The protagonist goes on her emotional and spiritual journey, but it is one you have to watch. At no point are any of the philosophical questions posed by the game directed to you.

If this sounds familiar, you might have played Crystar from the same creators, which has a very similar premise but with a fantasy journey through Purgatory rather than the dystopian futuristic setting of Crymachina. The fragments of Personality Data you collect from the digital world in Crymachina echo the wisps of human souls you encounter in the afterlife in Crystar. Even the relationship between the protagonists and the characters that guide them through the mysterious new world has the same emotional beats.

Crymachina seems to reimagine the plot of Crystar in a different setting. While the new game is certainly well-built in terms of its action and design, the studio certainly could have done more to make this game feel unique compared to its predecessor. As it is, some of the dialogue creates an awkward sense of deja vu if you’re at all familiar with Crystar.

If you enjoyed Crystar and would like more of the same, you’ll likely enjoy Crymachina. Despite how beautifully crafted many of its elements are, it is somewhat overpriced compared to other games in the same bracket that offer more depth, complexity, and originality.

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You are given the option of one of ten heroes to be your champion in the beginning and set off on your adventure. Each hero’s deck is crafted to showcase their unique strengths and weaknesses against the various enemies you’ll encounter on your campaign. 

You get the option to recruit other heroes as you progress and can journey with a party of three, using all of their decks collaboratively in battle. The various heroes’ skills interact in interesting ways. The enormous range of potential combinations gives you plenty of opportunities to get creative in your approach to the game.

Gordian Quest offers multiple modes to play. Campaign mode takes you on a quest spanning four acts, battling supernatural enemies to keep the world safe. Realm mode offers an increasingly challenging roguelite experience, which ends only when you are defeated. Skirmish mode offers a chance to pit your party against a friend. Adventure mode offers procedurally generated maps and dungeons that expand on the world established in the campaign mode. 

Each of these can be tackled with different hero combinations, skill tree choices, and deck choices to offer endless hours of gameplay. Every run is different. Even just playing through the campaign multiple times can offer unique experiences due to the randomized nature of the enemies you face and your choice of how to approach them. The more you understand the world, the more creative choices you are empowered to make as you go through it.

On your adventure, you collect gold, armor and weapons, many of which add cards to your deck once they’re equipped. You can enhance your equipped items with runes to adjust the way they impact your story. This gives you endless opportunities to customize your team to how you want to play each time, as long as you manage to uncover those rarer, more powerful items.

The world of Gordian Quest is genuinely interesting. The art is absolutely incredible, both in terms of the stylistic maps you traverse and the sprites you encounter in battle. The characters, both good and evil, are gorgeously rendered and have thrilling moves that look and feel exactly how you would imagine. 

The story is well-paced, with increasingly challenging battles that force you to think creatively about your strategy, both in and out of combat. The world is legitimately interesting, built up over time as different NPCs teach you more about the various regions you cross and the threats they face that you are tasked with tackling. Each act consists of a number of missions people will ask you to undertake to investigate the villains. You’ll battle monsters and eventually make your way up to a boss battle for that section.

Gordian Quest ultimately tells a classic fantasy story. It’s not the most original tale you’ll ever hear, but it is clearly trying to emulate history RPGs. It does pay a lovely homage to its influences in a way that makes it easy to forgive any tropes in the narrative.

It would be nice to see some elements of the gameplay pushed to the forefront. For instance, the collaboration between the members of your party is a key skill you can develop, but largely takes place at campsites, which you have to use your supplies to set up – and can simply choose not to set up at all. There are plenty of text sections offering context and interesting facts about specific aspects of the game where some dialogue options could be injected to build on the social bonding function. 

Still, Gordian Quest is a very comprehensive game, with a huge amount of action built in and a lot to do. Maybe it isn’t all that surprising that some elements take a backseat. Having to dig into it to get the full experience is far from a rare issue in games so vast, nor something that breaks the game.

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