Quick Reviews: More Card Games

It's been a few months since I last was digging through the card games I've been gathering up on Steam, and so it's time to resolve the stack and get through some more card games that I've been playing, this time it's weighted a bit more towards recent releases, as the oldest still is less than 2 years old and the new games have only been out for the last couple months. So without further ado, lets see what to discard from this hand of Vampire Crawlers, Slay the Spire 2, Occlude, and Menace from the Deep.

Vampire Crawlers

Vampire Crawlers is essentially a follow-up to Vampire Survivors (a game which absolutely hooked me when I played it), but decides to go for a new genre. So this time it takes the same style, characters, weapons, and levels but applies it all to a card-based roguelite format. Coming out at the start of April, I was quite skeptical coming into this because I didn't think the odds were high that the game could be switched up this much and still work well... it just felt like there was so much balancing here that'd be needed to stand a chance of a solid game that I thought this would underperform significantly (sort of like how no one expected Michael Jordan to be particularly good when he jumped to baseball, no matter how good he was at basketball).

Right off the bat (heh), the whole thing looks both familiar and different at the same time. The first-person view for a griddy dungeon explorer feels very different from the top-down view of Vampire Survivors, but the symbols are very familiar, and the look of the environments makes this feel, to me, like we've just zoomed in on Vampire Survivors the same way that the final zoom in on Google Maps can switch it to street view. The biggest change that shows up is this isn't as relentless in attention - there's no timed element to moving around, the battles are discrete encounters, and the battles are turn-based. So in some regards I think this is a bit more relaxed.

In battle, this shifts to turn-based attacks where the order matters significantly, particularly too build up combos against row after row of slowly advancing enemies. And the first taste of the elements of Vampire Survivors that were borrowed from gambling show up with some of the attacks that can do damage to multiple enemies. It's still satisfying, but I didn't know how far that could go. It takes a while, but eventually one gets not just unlocks of more cards and powering up baseline abilities, but also a range of gems that can be applied to cards to do things like multiply damage or lower mana costs. And so this game turned a bit of a corner the first time my deck reached a point that it became basically infinite with a combination of mana generation and card drawing - and of course the game was designed with this in mind, so once the combo score was around 100, the cards begin to literally break. It's a super satisfying mechanic.

So while the game was satisfying when I started and I hit an initial wall when the difficulty spikes for the third dungeon, Teeny Bridge (eventually I went and did some unlocks, and Mortaccio was the skeleton key I needed for that), I kept pushing through and the game has turned the same sort of corner that I remember Vampire Survivors had. It's also helped a bit that I can apply some of what I remember from Vampire Survivors to have an idea on some of the item/powerup mechanics here. I'm about 15 hours in now, and 125 of 161 achievements, but I know I'm going to keep coming back to this to keep unlocking more of this. Very pleased to see that they were able to strike gold a second time.

Slay the Spire 2

Slay the Spire 2 is Mega Crit's much-anticipated sequel to 2019's Slay the Spire, which I finally got around to playing last year. Released in Early Access in March, it feels to me like the biggest deal here was the addition of multiplayer, so I should note that that's not something I've played around with at all since while I dig rougelite card games, I don't have the same hankering for playing them with someone else that it seems a lot of other people had. So maybe I'm missing a big draw here.

When it comes to the battles, Slay the Spire 2 looks very similar. It has the same sort of look as the first game (unsurprisingly), and many of the same mechanics feel the same, so the cards, relics, and potions are all back, as is the overall navigation map. There's still a few different characters with different cards/mechanics to choose from, and while a couple seem the same from the first game, there's a few new kinds of characters in here too. It mostly feels like there's just been a big increase in complexity with a lot more specialized mechanics... and I don't think that makes for a fun addition, overall. It felt cluttered. The one exception to this, maybe, is the quest mechanic that this has added, where you can get a card that is useless but will transform or unlock something if you can reach a later point of the game with it - for example, I was able to get a sidekick bird by hatching an egg.

The other thing it feels like this is doing is trying to add more of a sense of story. The first game may have had a plot or a sense of worldbuilding, but it didn't have it in any way that stuck with me. So what Slay the Spire 2 has instead aimed to do is have all the unlocks reveal panels on a timeline, and I guess it's an interesting way to add some lore. It doesn't feel as compelling as it could, though, because it feels like I'm getting all the story in a random order, so at some stage I started ignoring this figuring that it'd make more sense to come back and read at the end and can go through them in order rather than reading them as I go.

I have, admittedly, only put a few hours into Slay the Spire 2, but it's already feeling like a bit of a struggle. I'm just not compelled to really jump back into it because it feels like a less elegant version of Slay the Spire. I can see the other playstyles being something that might motivate someone, and maybe the multiplayer is a big draw for other people, but for me it largely just feels like a lesser rehash of Slay the Spire thus far.

Occlude

Occlude is a 2024 release from Tributary Games, and the much more atmospheric description of this is "a ritual disguised as Solitaire". Also calling itself a cosmic-horror card game, it's the sort of descriptions that I found super-intriguing. After all, I like cosmic-horror and I like card games (this will be a theme).

The gameplay itself is pretty simple to explain, even if it's hard to figure out. There's a series of solitaire-based challenges, where each suit is being cleared starting from either end, and cards being able to be played on other cards of the same suit, either one larger or one smaller. The added twist to this, though, is that for each suit there's a card that needs to be cleared last. However, you don't know which those cards are, or HOW to figure out which cards those are. And the latter changes every puzzle; it's a concept that I like, but it does feel like the only way to keep track of this at a certain stage is to be writing a lot down. I'm not sure if there's a good fix to that, that allows this to both be complex and also slightly intuitive.

Where the added cosmic-horror comes in is the endings.... each puzzle comes with a fairly evocative backstory (brief paragraphs that convey a solid sort of mood for why someone would be carrying out an occult ritual), and then different endings depending on how many of the suits one was able to complete 'correctly'. Find the best outcome, and get a relic and some more lore, as well as the best outcome for each little vignette that bookends the puzzle. I think the challenges quickly start to feel inelegant, but I like the mood and concept of this.

Menace from the Deep

Menace from the Deep is a 2024 deckbuilder roguelike from Flat Lab, and if that menu screen is any indication, there's a very heavy Lovecraftian basis at the root of this, combined with a 1920s-era setting. And unlike other rougelike deckbuilders (looking at you, Slay the Spire 2), this really leaned into having there be a strong story component that I find really compelling and gradually unfolds with additional playthroughs.

The core motivation here is a mysterious group that shows up in an eerie town to repair a library and also try to tap into the occult goings-on. Slightly archetypal, the defined characters in that group are all mysterious and a bit offputting. So the meta story follows them and gives some additional insight into them (with voiced scenes) while each run is the sinister organization sending out another more generic recruit that is much more disposable. And an extra part to each run is that it also involves collecting resources that go towards some basic base-building in order to improve future runs and unlock additional options.

The battles themselves remind me quite heavily of Slay the Spire (though that may just be the broader genre and Slay the Spire was just my entry), but it feels like the Lovecraftian elements allow this all to have a much more uniform atmosphere to it. It does seem to have a much larger focus of having side characters, thus far I've just seen animal minions of a sort. On the other side of things are a mix of humans and monsters, and as expected for a Lovecraftian game, sanity i an additional factor here.

The slightly larger gameplay cycle are acts involving 13 selected events from a travel deck (battles, merchants and healers of various sorts, and much more thematic events) then culminating in a boss fight. I like this approach for navigation because I've been able to strategize how I want to use those travel cards either more or less aggressively. So far, I've only made it to the end of the second act; I'm presuming that this is following a Slay the Spire formula and there will be three acts in total for a run, but we'll see.

The events all have this aura of mystery about them, and I think they do benefit from being a single image combined with text because it does allow this to be a bit more creepy than it'd be if it was full animation or something like that (in much the same way that I think Lovecraft works best in text because the most unnerving things are those that can't really be easily visualized or comprehended). I'm only a few hours in, but the way this is dropping bits of additional plot is a really strong driver to get me to come back and see more of those cutscenes or find more clues towards the backstory of characters. I'm also pretty tempted to pick up the DLC that opens up a little more content in this. The best credit to this I can give is that even that early in, I've already been recommending this to people who I think would enjoy this aesthetic/theme in a roguelike.

Recap

Vampire Crawlers manages to catch lightning in a bottle a second time; it's an incredibly worthwhile successor to Vampire Survivors and is absolutely worth checking out. There's a reason I've put this much time into a game that's only been out like two weeks. It's available on multiple platforms, and can be found on Steam and the Nintendo Store for the Switch, as well as PlayStation and Xbox.

Slay the Spire 2 just doesn't do it for me. Again, maybe the multiplayer is a gamechanger I just don't appreciate it, or it's just more Slay the Spire for people who dug that game much more than I did. The Early Access version of Slay the Spire 2 is currently available on Steam, but I feel like someone new would be better off just grabbing the original Slay the Spire and playing that instead.

Occlude finds a sweet spot of being puzzle-driven but integrating a series of small stories to build up a greater sense of world building, and feels pretty easy to return to and chip away at. Occlude is available on Steam.

Menace from the Deep really taps into what intrigues me when it comes to Lovecraftian worlds and I like how it found a balance between an overarching story with interesting characters that gradually expands and more disposable recruits that only last one run. I'm very tempted by the DLC and the whole thing can be found on Steam.