Indies' Lies

I figure this must be a translation or make by brilliant small children, because the grammar is horrible and the card mechanics are confusingly worded, but the game is amazing. It's pretty close to slay the spire, which I paid like 20$ for on three seperate platforms. This game is free and I think it's a better game. If you want to unlock the whole story you can pay for the DLCs (3$ a pop) and once you pay for the first one you can turn off the ads, but you may not want to, you only watch ads to gain a benefit. Really, the game is 5/5 with or without paying for it. I was really impressed by it. My wife and I have been sick for weeks and I must have sunk 70 hours or more into it so far, and I don't think I'll be slowing down anytime soon. Which brings me to my one complaint, I have been playing Daniels roguelike to unlock his story for about 30 hours. He's not my favorite character, but I'm a completionist and I want to unlock his story to unlock his optional starting talents. I take every ? I can and make it impossible to encounter enemies half the time. And I have not seen Funky Brew quest prompt yet. At this point either I have the worst rng imaginable or its broken. If it's broken please fix.

Mechanically this is a nice deck builder with plenty of depth and content to keep it engaging. The art and polish are impressive and it has enough originality and distinction from other games in the genre to earn a spot on my tablet. But the translation to English is so unwieldy it gets in the way of the experience. The tooltips, card text, and lore references make it hard to know what’s going on, both due to grammar and word choice and also some flat out bizarre associations between one thing and another. For instance the Event nodes always come with some quote from the game world’s historical archives that seems completely out of context with the event it’s supposed to illuminate. I’m sure these references make perfect sense in the developer’s native culture, but that sense is utterly lost in translation. (What are all these “camps”?) This continual weirdness makes a well designed and beautifully produced game feel confusing and disjointed to play. Just one good localization pass could fix this completely if done by someone with the proper linguistic and cultural comprehension. I’d like to see that because this is a really nice game that deserves to succeed.

I was NOT ready for the fun I was delving into when I downloaded this. This game has your StS type game mode but also has a Story Adventure for each hero that adds more depth to the game. You have to unlock certain achievements for each hero to unlock the story. Once you finish the story, you unlock other cool things…not going to spoil it…that make for more fun runs later. The story is narrative and choice based! On top of that the talents you get every run are randomized so there is no short of potential here for some really awesome runs. You also get teammates in this game, unlike StS. If you’re a fan of Steamworld Quest and Slay the Spire, then here is your hybrid alien baby waiting for you to pick it up and play with it! You will not be disappointed!