The good: cartoon graphics, scuzzy atmosphere, a variety of buffs and status effects to navigate. Combat and exploration gameplay is interesting – when the game allows players the chance to move.

The bad: Poorly balanced. Any game in which your team can be stunlocked to death from the first turn is rough, and DSD tries to make every encounter dangerous. Unfortunately, this means that your forward progress is always subject to a wipe solely on the basis of bad luck. The plot is nonsensical. And the game is full of padding as you can only heal by returning to the main base.

Extra credit: DSD might be the first card battler that I felt actually played like an older school, turn-based, menu-based RPG. Introducing decks and randomness to the formula is fun, and I’ll probably explore more games in this subgenre on the strength of the idea.

Final verdict: if I had not been doing this as part of a backlog challenge, I would have dropped this game halfway through. It’s out of ideas by then, and the ending is hardly any different from the rest of the game. This team stretched a few ideas at least 15 hours too far.

Deep Sky Derelicts is a decent dungeon crawler with excellent presentation. Some may say they stole it from Darkest Dungeon, but they stole it from Mike Mignola first.
The degree of character customization is good and the card combat helps distinguish different encounters, even if it's only because of the RNG inherent to the genre.
Equipment is tied to cards so prioritizing either stats or moves is always a concern and prevents the game from becoming just about picking the biggest number.
I specially liked the story because the protagonists have a mundane, realistic motivation that plays into the world building. You can also learn more about the setting from character interactions and electronic devices you can find.
The only major gripes I have with it are the lack of direction at the beginning since the tutorial is too brief in my opinion and combat encounters can get painfully long by the end of the campaign, I'm talking about the last 2 or 3 derelicts.

Enjoyable game that goes on for too long and gets old. At first, I was really into going on short expeditions, getting some XP, finding some loot and going through the usual motions of upgrading and evolving my setup, and I'm always into any game that borrows its art style from Mike Mignola, but the campaign drags on for too long and feels too similar throughout. Board derelict, explore by pushing the scan button and either avoiding or taking on enemies as you see fit, take on missions that are always fetch quests of some form and plan your escape before you run out of energy or oxygen. The latter aspect kept the game engaging at first, but perhaps the biggest problem with the game is that, if you do the side quests and explore fully (which the game encourages by having a "% explored" stat for each derelict), you end up too wealthy too quickly and it kills the challenge of the game. The only remaining "challenge" is, towards the end, when enemies decide to just have like 95% evasion rate sometimes and that's just frustrating. I marked the game as completed, but honestly, I gave up before the last derelict and didn't see the ending. It's just going to be another, even larger, derelict with the same challenges and probably enemies with 100% evasion rate, and the game barely even has a story worth concluding. I'm harsh on the game since it ended up disappointing, but it was enjoyable for the majority of the playthrough and it's just disappointing that it didn't feel fun enough to finish.