Enemies are drawn from an endlessly creative mind, sometimes grotesque, but mostly Jim-Henson-like in their overblown character. Slovenly kings throw out animated dinner plates to attack cat-rats climb over a siege engine in an attempt to lob fireballs. Unlike other games in the genre, there’s not much demonic grimness here.Īnd as you would expect from Richard Garfield, much stays the same, but an awful lot changes. Introductions to Roguebook are familiar: choose your character, and then choose a second as your sidekick. That’s not too unusual: games like Monster Train and The Amazing American Circus have dabbled in multiple characters, each bringing their own cards to the deck. With them chosen, you set off on a rogue-like journey to see how far you can get. So far, so familiar, but it doesn’t take long for the cogs of innovation to start whirring. Once you hop out of your safe haven and into the world of Roguebook, you’d be forgiven for being completely daunted. This is a world of hexagons, sprawling out as far as you can see, like an old ‘80s war board game. They represent the world, and they come in two states: revealed and unrevealed. You can travel over the revealed hexagons – in fact, Breath of the Wild-style, you could head right to the castle from the start and have a pop if you fancy it, but much like Nintendo’s game, that would be suicide. It’s a fog of war, effectively, and that fog is lifted in the most surprising way. You carry paintbrushes, and you can stand in an area, press Y, and ‘paint’ all of the hexagons around you. By painting them, you reveal what was beneath them, from enemies to treasures to events to gold and much, much more besides. Less powerful but similar are ink pots, which let you reveal individual hexes or a few in a line. It rips up the Slay the Spire template of having a chain of nodes with miniscule choice between paths, and offers up something that could have been a game unto itself. It’s sensational and works regardless of how you want to approach it. Want to race through? Sure you can: beeline to the castle, taking in a couple of elite enemies who give the best rewards. Want to optimise your deck before you head in? Sure, you can do that too, and exploration becomes a game of risk-reward, as you balance the risk of battle versus the paint pots they give you.
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