After Slay the Spire released into Early Access in 2017 and was one of the best-designed games ever made, a wave of roguelike deckbuilders inevitably followed. Most of these were, I would say, pretty uninteresting — Slay the Spire excels not just due to its solid core mechanics, but the complex finely-tuned interactions of its items and cards making each run a uniquely compelling puzzle. Many of these games simply aped the basic gameplay, with the cards themselves offering rather uninteresting cost/damage/defense trade-offs. A few of the cleverer designs grounded the mechanics into a different context, such as a tactics board or longer-form adventure, which allowed them to offer something unique rather than simply being a less interesting version of Slay the Spire, but few offered much over Spire at the level of being compelling card games.
Monster Train is one of the best of the post-Spire deckbuilders. Released in 2020, Monster Train changed the formula in two important ways: First, rather than each card being an attack or maneuver performed by the player character, many cards were instead creatures that were placed onto the field to defend against attacking units, and most other cards were spells that could be played on either these allied units or on enemies. Second, rather than card upgrades being a static element, where one could choose to either upgrade a card or not for some known effectiveness boost, upgrades were reworked into special power bonuses that could be applied to a slot in any compatible card — so, in addition to finding synergies between cards and items, you could also synergize with specific upgrades, opening up exciting avenues for player inventiveness and offering an almost exponential power development over the course of the game.
A few weeks ago Wildfrost came out, certainly the most exciting development of the genre since Monster Train. The core design is similar to a very stripped down version of Monster Train: You have Allies and Constructs which you place on the field — a pair of three-tile long lanes, with an opposing pair of three-tile lanes for your opponent — and Items which you play from your hand to affect those units. As in Monster Train, all of these card types can be upgraded with charms to create new effects and synergies — though these effects are relatively understated.
The truly inspired part of the design, however, is that where Slay the Spire and Monster Train both have a system where you expend energy each turn to play cards, only passing your turn once you’re satisfied, Wildfrost combines the concept of energy and turns. Each time you play a card (with a few rare exceptions), one turn passes — and, as each turn goes by, the units on the field tick down towards their next attack. Rather than dumping and redrawing your hand every turn, you instead have to either waste a turn on a redraw or play a certain number of cards to get a free redraw. Thus each battle is a race against time, trying to maximize the effectiveness of each card play and organize your battle lines to absorb or preempt each attack.
This core design is tremendously impressive, capturing much of Monster Train’s explosive possibility space while still retaining much of Slay the Spire’s elegance. When it works it feels great: Each action is of monumental importance, each position of each unit matters, an immaculate and immediate tactical puzzle. However, the perfection of the broad strokes of the design is somewhat let down by some of the specific design decisions.
Some of these might be relatively straightforward to address. A lot of runs tend to end due to oversight of or confusion about incoming damage, suddenly losing the unit at the heart of your whole strategy to an attack you didn’t see coming. I’m sure many expert players will respond “git gud” in true gamer fashion, but I don’t think it adds much to the tactical puzzle of the game to force the player to calculate incoming damage from all sources and predict which unit it will be applied to: Some sort of incoming damage preview would be very helpful, not just for preventing unpleasant and confusing surprises but also for teaching the rules of the game before attacks even happen. There are some tricky cases here, of course: What do damage previews look like for enemies with the “aimless” trait, which makes them hit a random target in the row? Perhaps a range of damage, or perhaps just appending a “?” To the display. Should a preview appear when you’re about to use a skill that would change the outcome, or would that incentivize players to just try to preview everything and brute force solutions? Similarly, when applying a charm to a card, it would be helpful to see a preview of what the finished card will look like — it’s not always obvious how charms will interact with each other or with innate card abilities. Though the specifics are tricky, it’s still the case that a few such simple UI changes could make the game significantly more straightforward to play and easier to pick up.
Some issues are a bit thornier. Broadly speaking, every time there’s a choice to be made it fails to provide enough leverage to consistently put together a solid run. For instance, at the start of a run you have a choice of three “leader” units, each from one of the different factions. If your leader dies, you lose the run, and while leader units are clearly designed to be approximately equally useful, there are definitely better and worse picks available. Sometimes you get locked into playing one faction just due to the other leaders being bad — sometimes all three leaders are bad, and you just deal with playing a bad run. Some of this can be addressed by tweaking the leader selection, but also choosing a faction separately to choosing a leader would likely improve the player’s control while still pushing them to deal with dynamic challenges.
Similar issues emerge any time the player is asked to select a card. While the pool of cards to choose from isn’t gigantic, it’s not uncommon to be offered a choice of one of three cards which are simply not useful in the current context. Skipping an item card is not allowed, so every item card encounter has a non-trivial chance of making your deck slightly but significantly worse. Card removal events can be encountered in the world, but since they can often only be visited by sacrificing the chance for a shop or item card they can really only be used to strengthen an already-powerful deck rather than strip away the worst parts of a weak one, and almost always are used to remove starter cards, leaving any duds found later on in encounters to drag you down. The net effect of all of these choices is that it’s quite common to feel trapped in a bad run, unable to strip away the cards that are bogging your deck down, slowly accumulating more of them as you’re presented with more unappealing choices with no chance to remove them.
A good way to fix a lot of these issues might be to expand the functionality of the shop. Each shop contains four cards, a seemingly infinite random supply of gradually-more-expensive charms, and a crown which can be applied to a card to make it playable for free at the start of combat. Compared to Slay the Spire there are very few cards available for purchase, just one more than in a standard treasure encounter, which makes them barely better than such an encounter for the purposes of finding a card which makes your deck better than worse. Compared to Monster Train, the charms are all randomized and unknown, so spending 50 gold can completely arbitrarily yield something that suddenly makes your deck unstoppable or something that’s a completely useless joke. Expanding the shop with a couple more cards and with a finite and visible selection of charms that can be strategically and intentionally purchased would go a long way, as well as adding some sort of purchasable card removal (perhaps just one per shop). It might, perhaps, even be worthwhile to have separate charm and card shops, adding a bit of depth to the decision of which node to visit.
These problems could also be addressed to some degree by simply increasing the number of encounters per stage of the game, but those sorts of changes can be tough to balance against the overall challenge curve. Some events might need to be reduced in effectiveness or frequency to counterbalance the additional encounters. This is a straightforward solution, but one that would require so much playtesting to ensure a good result that I can’t describe it as a quick fix.
The final major issue I have with the game is that the three current tribes — factions which determine what cards are available to you — do not seem equally well-considered. The Snowdwellers tribe, the only one initially available, centers around relatively straightforward attack/defense boosts and disabling units with slowing snow attacks. This is fine, if perhaps a bit straightforward. The Clunkmaster tribe centers around card generation and manipulation and is very interesting, resourceful, and fun to play with. However the Shademancers, centered around summoning and sacrificing units… simply don’t seem to work very well at the moment.
The first issue I encountered with this faction is that almost their entire starting deck is taken up with 5 Tar Blade cards, an item which does damage equal to the number of Tar Blades in-hand. This is a pretty boring card to start off with so many of, and not an especially strong one. It is, moreover, one that only gets weaker as the game progresses and your deck grows, one that doesn’t meaningfully interact with any of the tribe’s core mechanics, and one that can’t really be strategized around. These are not interesting cards — similar cards in other games can be interesting because of the tension between a short term loss (a single weak card that does nothing) and a long-term gain (a set of powerful cards), but in Wildfrost these cards are all loss and no gain. Another significant issue is that a number of cards have special triggers on “sacrifice” — that is, something special happens when they’re killed by the player instead of by an enemy. The problem is, it’s not really clear what counts as a sacrifice. Does attacking something covered in spikes and dying as a result count? (No.) Does dying due to losing HP over time count? (No.) Does being destroyed by an allied unit’s active effect count? (Yes.) At each juncture, the player can make educated guesses about what might count as a sacrifice, but there’s really no way to be sure — another place where, perhaps, some form of combat preview would be helpful.
There are other issues. The “Soulbound Skulls” card, which randomly selects one enemy and one player unit to soulbind, making one unit die if the other one dies, is effectively a 1 in 6 chance of instantly losing if it happens to target the leader. The preponderance of units which can only function alongside one another, relying on sacrifices and deaths and triggers which can only happen once you manage to get several of them, makes each individually untakeable and the beginning of the game a hellish slog where the player struggles to find a single viable unit. The flavor of the faction and the core mechanics are cool, the interplay between them can be really fun, but the whole thing doesn’t seem designed in a way that acknowledges it’s in a deck builder and that you’re not going to have all these resources available, you’re going to have a few of them if you’re lucky enough to find them.
As is frequently the case, this whole review comes off a lot harsher than I actually feel about the game. The core design is incredible, the visual and audio presentation are fantastic, I have had the soundtrack stuck in my head for weeks. I hope all the stuff mentioned here can get ironed out, because I think with a little reworking this game could be one of the all-time greats.