Zoeti is a card-based RPG where you play as one of three classes. It sets itself apart from contemporaries by having the player go through story missions with a fixed set of cards as you play by the rules of Poker. Here you collect skill cards which you can assign to each Poker move (one pair, two pair, flush etc.) and activate the skills in combat by using the required cards for each move. As you go through the missions, you accumulate resources for upgrading your skill cards, character, buy passive and active items. One would be off-base to equate it to StS because in Zoeti you’re not building a deck per se. You’re amassing power through resources, choose what skill cards you wanna upgrade and what move slots to put them in, and decide what moves you wanna dish out with any given hand. The game's combat suggests an intriguing depth as you have to make decisions between the different moves with a Poker rulesets meeting turn-based card RPG mechanics - a pretty novel approach away from the mana-based combat we’ve seen countless iterations on. The story aspect is conveyed through a visual novels with a light-hearted atmosphere, tongue-in-cheek humour and well-drawn characters and pleasant backgrounds. The writing itself is serviceable, though it doesn’t seem very interesting in the early game missions.

Despite all this, I’ve had a rather frustrating time with Zoeti. And I think the reason why the game doesn’t feel compelling enough despite its interesting combat system and neat art presentation, is how it feels to navigate the game. The UI frankly leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to status effects, items, combat - really, conveying easily or at a glance both what’s at your disposal and what’s going on. Having to scroll through status effects box being required to find out about status effects on a unit is definitely the most awkward aspect as it makes the combat tedious and unappealing. Now I’m not saying the likes of StS have great UI design, but the fact that they allow you to hover a status icon and see what it does makes it intuitive for the player and allows them to learn each effect as they play.

The scroll issue goes for the items, too. You amass a pretty decent chunk of items as they’re one of the main ways of enhancing your character and having to scroll through them Now you can avoid that by going into the Prepare menu and see them more easily, but that means 2 clicks (1 screen transition). A workaround here would be if the Accessory icon next to the items would you straight to that menu point. Same for the item and card overview. It would also help if things were more clearly popping out to the player by either glowing on mark-up, or sticking out more in another as every icon has the same color palette. The Prepare icon being small and at the top right of the screen doesn’t lend itself to easy access as it is.

Now about combat. Unit selection is a separate process from using your combos which isn’t necessarily bad, but the target icon isn’t very visible (again, a lot of the game is very white/beige). Making combos by selecting cards is a click on/off process unless you wanna use the preselected combo offered by the game. It’s not issue on keyboard+mouse, but with a controller it can be a real pain. I think the fact that selecting a move only shows one possible way to use up your hand makes it finicker than it needs to be. Being able to cycle through different ways of using your hand with each combo could be a bandaid. Really, these are minor issues on top of the combat being messy because of how previously mentioned issues with UI and status effects are only exacerbated on controller and make playing the game an even more tedious affair. Definitely a game I’d recommend only playing with keyboard+mouse in its current state.

When the game does save and when you're good to close the game isn't quite clear either, as there's no save icon conveying this information, nor a save button you can use. It seems to save after every map completion. This uncertainty makes the game unsuited for short game sessions and is something that should really be clearly communicated to the player.

All in all, don’t get me wrong, it’s a promising game with a good foundation and novel spin. At the same time, it is frustrating because I can see its potential, which is why I took the time to outline why I think it didn’t manage to win me over, and where it could be improved on the technical side. As it stands, I can’t give it a recommendation.