solid game, with essentially simple mechanics that work together in interesting ways. the main problem with these “simple” mechanics is that they’re poorly explained (or not explained at all), and at times unnecessarily obscure. for example, the health system has three different numbers for seemingly no reason other than “RGB” — maybe time was too short to properly develop mechanics around the this health system, but right now it only adds confusion without adding any depth.

a few other minor issues I encountered:

• the window is tiny, and there’s no option to resize it or go fullscreen.
• the health numbers for a hovered card doesn’t update without unhovering and rehovering.
• I couldn’t figure out when the “aberrated” effect actually triggers, as it seems kinda inconsistent, especially between the player and enemies.
• Plague Doctor doesn’t seem to work all the time, but this could be a problem with me not understanding the timing of “aberrated”.
• being forced to add cards to the deck after every fight inevitably leads to a bloated deck, and RNG becomes a major factor.

the core gameplay is solid, it’s just lacking some polish, more content, and some proper structure. it seems like it goes on forever, so I eventually lost on purpose. this is how far I got:

this game is really heat

So right off the bat I need to say I really find this concept engaging! I've played a ton of physical card/board games in my time and I'm really actually surprised that I haven't played something quite like this. After just two turns the concept really clicked with me and I was off! Ended up stacking Lumen Golems (My beloveds) and Alchemists to help fuel their production.

The card art, though simple, I actually quite enjoyed, each of the creatures have personality and are distinct enough that you can tell what they are by sight and don't need to do much hovering around reading them to strategize.

Since the player and their opponent play by slightly different rules when it comes to card positioning, it might be wise to delineate the front five spaces that the player can play cards in and the back ten that the opponent's cards move through. And just as well I do wish there was a way to either remove cards from my deck, or at the least, skip selecting new cards in-between rounds. This is because very quickly your deck becomes thick and somewhat unreliable. The only reason I believe that I lost was due to this, I ended up pulling several high cost cards in a row and could not play anything before it was too late in my last two duels.

Overall I really liked it! And I would absolutely play a more fully realized version of this, perhaps a little too much haha.

this game is PEAK

I thought the turn based flow and animations of the cards was nice, it was hard to get into the gameplay, needed to be more common for me with how the cards worked