At first it seemed unbeatable. Then I found a character I clicked with and beat it twice in a row. And then I got bored.

A nifty little thing with very short legs, I thought. After beating it twice I didn't feel much pull back, nor any interest in trying out the higher difficulty. I felt like there weren't enough interesting decisions to make during play; before deciding to shelve the game, I did think that I had tipped my toe in too little, but eh, life is short.

That’s what I thought after a few hours with the game - and then spent the next few weeks of occasional play to 99% the game.

And I came so damn close to a 100%.

It's just that finding those last items is a bit too much trouble than I care for. But oh boy, slowly moving from failing every run to completing every run to balancing somewhere between them, with dips towards one or the other side depending on the character, difficulty (and luck), and finally arriving at a place where I'm playing with some truly bonkers strategies, this game managed to slip near my heart and make itself home there (for a while).

The simple and seemingly luck-based gameplay slowly gave way to a more nuanced understanding of the game and its characters. I still can't tell you what a good strategy would be or what I do differently now from when I started the game (and got whooped every run), but I sure am doing something differently, enough to even tackle some expert courses. The random dial can still sometimes swing so cruelly that there truly is no way of coming back, but you can prepare for it (to a degree) and the game does offer moments of sweet calculation as you’re trying to figure out the best course of action considering your limited choices (and oh how sweet it is to then come out on top). Though perhaps the sweetest thing might still be a clean run of few enemies and shields all the way. Arriving at the final boss with 99 shield and a big sword is a moment of delicious OP; even more delicious is killing him before he can even touch you (or running through the game with 999 stealth, cackling madly at the fools incapable of doing anything - and it wasn’t even nearly my wildest run).

So, at first a disappointment, blossomed into a game I spent more time with than I could have imagined (and definitely is worth more money than the game costs). Delicious.

(Played on Android, actually, but there's no choice for that ...)

Pretty fun game.

Gameplay feels decently unique. You move up a board made of cards, and when you land on a card you play it.

The cards are more of an aesthetic representing event tiles. It's not really a card game and you don't really have a deck or do deckbuilding.

The majority of gameplay is just figuring out how to path to the end of the level while having enough health/armor left over to survive the boss. The rest is picking up items that grant passive bonuses.

There's a fair amount of viable builds, classes, and gamemodes. And I enjoyed playing the game overall, but after 6 hours, I'm feeling that runs have become very same-y. I have 83% of the unlocks completed and all "challenges" completed, but it's starting to feel like I've seen every possible build. All enemies are also the exact same, including bosses. They just inflict damage one time and maybe one of three status effects. When I play now, it feels like I'm just going through the motions. Nothing feels new or surprises me anymore.

I enjoyed playing this game for the first 4-5ish hours and I still play it kill a couple minutes every once in a while. Still recommend, just know it's not a very large game.