It's not mrkgnao's boycott. Collecting the names of people who are boycotting GOG because of their abandonment of their DRM-free principle was the idea of Time4Tea. I had decided not to buy here anymore before that thread existed and had voiced that opinion in the forum and to GOG's staff (no reply of course).

In the case of Absolver it's not only cosmetics, not only the boss battles but also some fighting techniques that can only be learned online. You can use them in single-player, but there is no way to learn them. So a major part of that game is locked behind an online registration. And in Nex Machina entire levels are locked behind a Galaxy requirement. So no, this isn't mrkgnao's private grievance with GOG. This is a grievance that everyone has who wants GOG to keep their promises of '100% DRM-free' and 'Galaxy always optional'.


But on topic: the game looks interesting. I'll buy it once GOG becomes a DRM-free store again. Or once it appears in another DRM-free store.

I'm a sucker for games that combine RPG and card game elements, but jeeez, again with the procedural generation? I'm starting to think we should ban all new releases with procedural generation for a year, to halt the spread of the disease. I get it that it can be a useful tool, and has it's place, but indie games rely on it way to much.

Noticed the growth in card games too?.

Seems to be helluva lot more of them generally (or maybe the youtubers i watch for indie games seem to play them mostly)... seems heaps lol

I don't complain, even though I'm behind with my wishlist so I can wait. Neurodeck was underwhelming but I'm interested in Ring of Pain, Fate Hunters and Wingspan among others. Maybe GOG should make a deck-building/card game tag but I know they are too lazy for that. It might be the time to keep a list of games with card play elements and see how it grows.
Anyway here on GOG there's nothing compared to the shower of card games available on Steam, yes. I was surprised to see Legend of Keepers here while still in development. But all in all what we have here is just a fraction of a bigger trend that survives both curation and lack of interest for GOG from the devs.

So this game's "OK". I don't see it getting too much staying power. The combats are quick (great!), there's constant slow burn growth (OK), but at a point you get severely limited in how far you can go without tons of grind. Like severely -- unlocking new storage costs 150 "tokens", or directly buying a rare card costs 50-100+... yet you only get 1 token to sell common cards, 2 for uncommon, and 4 for rare cards (and you only earn one card per victory, with each "run" having ~8 battles). So you need to grind a TON to get any progress toward those rare/epic cards. Loot is entirely random and almost always not going to help you... and you can't sell it except 1 piece at random per "run" for a random card.

The graphics are overblown [pretty, but you quickly find the repetitiveness of them due to the procedural generation] for the kind of game it is. The flashes and "click to open loot chest" and "drag card to use it" (instead of more sensible clicking), along with the above tokens bit make this game reek of "this was originally envisioned as a microtransaction-fueled mobile game".

There's a good core here. I can definitely see it turning into a fine quality game after more development (if they want to go the right direction), but, for now, it's mediocre and "play a few evenings when I just want to click the time away mindlessly".

If they tighten up the RNG a bit and give you actual direction/choice, that'd be great (there are four "elements", good luck getting complementary stuff together!) Add the ability to discard cards you aren't going to use [at least one per turn] so you don't die just because of a clogged hand. (You have a "deck" of 14 cards. You draw 4 at start and can mulligan up to all of them, then you fill your hand to those 4 after any turn... But because combats are so quick, and because your cards don't cycle, you're often just not going to see even from those 14 cards. You VERY quickly run out of mana, and there's nothing to do with all those cards at all.) Speed up map movement considerably since it's really just extra-pretty node selection for next encounter, or make map movement meaningful. The way you level up cards by combining two like to go to the next is good, but too many cards are "maximum level" dead-ends even at just the first level (they don't decompose or combine in any way), lowering fun there.

Music is great ambiance. I haven't turned it off yet after ~4 hours of play, which is odd for this kind of game.

There are a few resolution/scaling issues (like you can't see the HP of your bottom right most unit at certain resolutions, including mine... and sometimes help tool-tips cut off on the left/right side of the screen so you can't actually read it. No GUI for windows/full screen, only keyboard alt-enter. 100% mouse control, though it looks like you can do keyboard controls too (there are no hints or visuals to show what the controls would be though). EDIT: And I just ran into an issue where the camera went way off from the character and you couldn't see what was going on (and there didn't appear to be a recenter-camera [since you shouldn't be able to move the camera separately] short of quitting the game).

Thank you.

This can be marked as fulfilled:
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/cardaclysm

A trend I'm starting to find really tiresome with indie games is giving them lazy portmanteau names like Cardaclysm. It's also often a warning sign of a lazy, slapdash product, and this looks exactly like that.

From the Steam reviews this appears to be a story-less, goal-less, RNG-based clown fiesta, that now gets released on GOG... lacking achievements... Why would anybody bother with this, when there are so many other masterpiece-level card games. At the rate at which good games are getting released, I wouldn't get around to playing this game before the Universe freezes over.

Sorry guys, this is a skip for me.

Not sure why but ultimately referring to a game as a clown fiesta absolutely cracked me up.

Thanks for the review. I don't like the graphics, I prefer hand-drawn 2D. But that's me. Incidentally, I like the early demo looks of Fate Hunters more then what they went for with the final release - I'm getting tired of the darker than darkest trend. Maybe it's going to be a while before some new card game better than Slay the Spire is released. Do you have any favourites - especially on GOG?

Am i the only one that thinks of this the moment i see the screenshots?

That was in fact my very first thought. :p