Janky card battlers have never looked this good.

There's something to say about the surge of deckbuilding games in recent years. They aren't over-saturated — not really, as much they might feel like they are — but they've definitely become something of a very common spice added to the indie roguelite stew. Want to make something where the player progressively stumbles their way into new abilities, and don't feel like making time-consuming animations or design-document-busting gameplay changes for each one? Make it into a deckbuilder! Real, physical playing cards have long been used in tabletop games to represent beings or concepts that would be otherwise unfeasible to depict; digital playing cards are a simple, near-universal substitute for computer games that can't or won't showcase more complex ways of interfacing with the game. It's an appealing solution to a variety of problems, making it no small wonder why the adoption of deckbuilding mechanics has become so widespread.

Majin and Sacrificial Girl (the in-game English title goes for Majin and Sacrifice Girl, but it's "sacrificial" everywhere else) is different from your usual deckbuilder roguelites in some pretty major ways. You can't actually die, meaning that your runs never restart; you can escape from a battle at any time without any penalty, so there are no consequences for going into a fight unprepared; you gain access to all of the cards in the entire game by the end of your playthrough; and, above all else, you can edit your deck at any time outside of combat to include or exclude whichever cards you want. All this, of course, makes the game completely trivial. You can't lose. No matter what happens, you'll win eventually. You can throw yourself into a fight with whatever random setup you can think of, get dropped to zero health, abandon the fight, and try it again with something different.

In this, Majin and Sacrificial Girl stands out from the crowd. If you've played a lot of games like Slay the Spire, or Monster Train, or Fights in Tight Spaces, then you're more than well aware of how punishing these titles can be. Most of them are brutal and unforgiving, and one small mistake is all it takes for a run to spiral completely out of control and become an inevitable loss. Majin and Sacrificial Girl pushes you towards an inevitable victory. Whether or not you find this concept massively interesting or massively boring is going to fall on personal preference.

This is to say nothing of the creepy monster designs or the way they're presented. The look of this game was the first thing to immediately draw me in, and it kept my eyes on screen through its entire runtime. The various creatures you'll stumble into while you roam the dithered dungeon halls are fairly archetypal — there are dragons, angels, things that look vaguely like some sort of goblin or imp — but they're all designed in this wonderful, ominous, otherworldly style that evokes elements of gothic horror and Biblical monstrosities. Monsters have too many faces, too many heads, and too many body parts. There's a blend of bizarre and striking that hits all of the right notes for me, and getting to see a new design floating deeper down in the dungeon was always a treat.

The unfortunate part of game development, though, is that you need to actually program a game to showcase all of your cool assets in. Majin and Sacrifcial Girl is a bog-standard game, mechanically; you cast your cards from a resource of AP, you hit the other guy until one of you falls over, rinse and repeat until the floor is cleared out. There are a decent handful of cards, but most of them are wholly outclassed by others that are strictly better: Spider deals 22 damage for 3 AP, and three Monster Fish will deal 24 damage for the same cost. Fruit will heal you 2 HP for 0 AP, and a Heart will heal 25 HP for 2 AP (getting AP is trivial, so costs are as close to a non-issue as you can get). Energy Drinks give +1 AP for free, meaning that they'll be an auto-include in literally every single deck. Tornadoes deal 15 damage for 2 AP and draw a card, and it's easy to go infinite in a deck with just them and Energy Drinks. While it's impossible to lose by design, it feels more than a little too easy to autopilot through every combat encounter. Some extra restrictions on deckbuilding would have been welcome here. It's not like you can die, after all. If you don't give your players a reason to experiment, then they'll stick with the winning strategy they've already got.

To call this game buggy would also be underselling the fact that it feels like it's barely holding itself together. Cards will regularly double-play themselves, forcing their effects to play twice in a row. This is great when an Energy Drink gives you +2 AP instead of +1, and awful when a Shield permanently increases its cost by +2 instead of +1 while also draining all of your AP for the turn. The deck editor itself is separated on both ends by loading screens; judging from the way the game locks up for a few moments, it unloads and reloads the entire dungeon every time you want to swap cards around. Saving the game was also a three-minute ordeal that nearly crashed the entire program twice in a single attempt. I may not be a programmer, but these are also not shippable bugs.

All in all, Majin and Sacrificial Girl might be one of the more fun 5/10s I've played. For all of its flaws, it's a short, snappy game that teases at some more interesting game systems than many of its contemporaries. This comes at the cost of some much-needed polish and game balancing, but this isn't the kind of thing that most people would be playing for the mechanics, anyway. It's a weird, wobbly look into a dithered world of monsters and majin, and you'll have a much better time trying to enjoy the ride than making an attempt to get anything greater out of it.

I really liked the little mushroom man who gives you HP.