Image & Form have jumped from one style to the subsequent throughout their twenty-odd-year historical past, however they’ve accomplished it with such confidence and constant brilliance that I used to be totally anticipating to fall head over heels with their new card-based RPG, SteamWorld Quest: The Hand of Gilgamech. And but, there was a time when Quest nearly misplaced me. As I stored enjoying the identical bunch of playing cards towards the identical bunch of enemies, I began to despair. Had SteamWorld’s magic lastly run out? Then I found twin hero bots Tarah and Thayne, and all was proper with the world once more.
Tarah and Thayne are good. These purple, rabbit-eared siblings are the final of SteamWorld Quest’s 5 (or ought to that be six?) heroes you’ll meet throughout this 15-20 hour journey, however man alive are they well worth the wait. For me, these two devious souls are the proper embodiment of what makes SteamWorld Quest such a rewarding and fiendishly partaking little card battler.
Each hero comes with their very own deck of playing cards, you see, and very like the character decks you’ll discover in Slay the Spire, all of them have their very own strengths and weaknesses. Main hero Armilly, for instance, is a hard-hitting knight, whereas the sagely Copernica offers in hearth and ice magic. Hulking frog bot Galleo, however, is the group’s primary healer, whereas the cunning samurai Orik makes use of his cool, kabuki-style theatre masks to shift between totally different buffs and play kinds whereas doling out fierce, katana-based lightning assaults.
Tarah and Thayne, nonetheless, are thieving orphans with a style for each large axes and darkish, arcane magic, and you may tailor their deck to go well with both trait or dabble in a little bit of each. They’re a extremely versatile and nuanced pair of fighters, sapping the power of others to bolster their very own whereas additionally enjoying off different members of your occasion to boost their assaults even additional. By the time I neared the tip of the game, they have been the glue that held my workforce collectively, and I’m undecided I’d have made it to the ultimate boss with out them.
Not that the game punishes you for falling in battle, although. If all of your characters faint, you’re merely plonked again on the nearest health-replenishing statue with all of your collected expertise, cash and objects nonetheless in tact. Nothing is ever misplaced in SteamWorld Quest, and its ‘get up and try again’ angle encourages you to actually dig into the ins and outs of the eight playing cards every character can take with them into battle and check out totally different combos.
It’s one thing I discovered myself doing on a reasonably common foundation within the latter half of the game, because the sheer variety of doable assaults have been simply too good to not experiment with. You’ll consistently want you had greater than eight character playing cards more often than not, however that is exactly what offers SteamWorld Quest its drive and sense of steadiness.
Within these eight playing cards, for instance, you’ll want an honest mixture of primary strike or improve playing cards with the intention to construct up the requisite quantity of ‘Steam Pressure’ (or SP) you’ll have to activate your extra highly effective Skill playing cards. Everyone shares the identical SP pool, too, so when you might theoretically overload one character with a great deal of high stage 3-Four SP playing cards, you’ll want one other hero with sufficient non-SP-eating playing cards to really make use of them, which actually isn’t any enjoyable or certainly an excellent technique when there’s a lot selection to be discovered each inside their particular person decks and the way in which they overlap and work together with these of your different characters.
Play considered one of Armilly’s playing cards immediately earlier than Tarah and Thayne’s lethal Double Swing, as an example, and the twins will get an additional power increase. Likewise, Galleo’s Super Soaker potential will decrease an enemy’s ice and lightning defences, giving Orik the proper alternative to swoop in afterwards and make the most of their newfound weaknesses. It’s an exquisite melding of powers and unpredictability – particularly when you too can redraw as much as two playing cards per flip to both clean up your hand or take an opportunity at getting an excellent higher set of assaults – and it actually feels such as you’re riffing off everybody’s strengths as a workforce as a substitute of merely enjoying all of them in isolation such as you would in, say, your common Final Fantasy game.
If you fall in battle, you’ll be whisked again to considered one of these gleaming inexperienced statues.
That mentioned, there actually is nothing extra satisfying than enjoying three of 1 character’s playing cards in a row and activating their particular chain assault – the impact of which differs in response to what sort of weapon they’ve obtained geared up. Armilly’s chain impact, for instance, begins off with Lionheart, which heals her a bit whereas giving her an additional assault. But after I purchased her a brand new sword that gave her the Lacerate potential, which is quite a bit weaker than Lionheart however offers Bleed harm for quite a few turns, I used to be in love. Each hero solely has three or 4 of those chain talents to select from over the course of the game, however there’s lots of pleasure and satisfaction to be present in operating by these form of psychological gymnastics gauntlets, deciding when to deploy them in favour of a combo assault and vice-versa, and figuring out how your chain assaults can increase different playing cards elsewhere in your deck.
It’s an ingenious and nearly impossibly good system contemplating that is Image & Form’s first outing with the style, but it surely’s additionally one I felt solely actually got here alive within the game’s second half – across the time when Tarah and Thayne enter the image. By then, you’ve obtained extra playing cards at your disposal, extra intensive combo alternatives, and the baddies you’re delivering these kick-ass paper cuts to have lastly began to evolve past the seemingly countless swathes of genero robo bees, hound guards and beaked mages that populate a lot of the game’s early hours.
That’s to not say the primary half is duff, thoughts. The studying curve is regular all through, the speed at which you purchase new playing cards both by crafting them on the merchandise store or discovering them in hidden treasure chests is fixed, and also you’re solely ever a handful of chapters away from having a brand new hero be part of your ranks and determining what makes them tick.
Indeed, my interval of doubt in all probability solely lasted a few chapters in complete, however there’s a string of them simply earlier than Orik arrives while you’re operating round lots of very similar-looking interconnecting hallways combating lots of very similar-looking enemies with what seems like the identical playing cards you’ve had for an eternity. Perhaps it was partly my very own fault for not experimenting extra with the playing cards I did have at my disposal, however while you’ve obtained a formulation that works, particularly towards such a restricted vary of enemies, there’s much less incentive to combine issues up.
In these moments, it began to really feel like I’d reached the restrict of what SteamWorld Quest needed to supply. Whereas the superb SteamWorld Heist had the joys of procedurally generated house ships and real-time aiming to assist preserve you in your toes, Quest’s fastened corridors and linear, turn-based fight can often err on the mildly repetitive aspect.
As I mentioned, all was forgiven as soon as Tarah and Thayne pitched up (Orik did assist, by the way in which, however the game’s continued reliance on the identical batch of enemy varieties didn’t), however there have been nonetheless different little niggles that didn’t fairly sit proper. I really like the truth that there’s a fast-forward button throughout fights, as an example, however I want the Skip button throughout cutscenes put an finish to the whole ream of admittedly fairly well-written chat as a substitute of merely transferring onto the subsequent line. Admittedly, this isn’t an issue in your first playthrough, however if you wish to return and replay a chapter to get all of the hidden treasure chests you missed then you definitely’d higher be ready for lots of tedious button mashing.
Likewise, the PC model’s keyboard and mouse controls might do with just a little refinement. Enter, for instance, is the default key for interacting with objects and getting the bounce on enemies while you strategy from behind, whereas your mouse doubles up as a location pointer and one other type of interplay button. I say type of, as a result of except your cursor is hovering over the exact enemy or object you wish to chop, you’ll simply run to wherever you’ve clicked, leading to a number of clumsy head bumps and sloppy approaches after I tried to sneak the primary hit in. It’s simply rectified by binding left click on to Interact as a substitute of Enter, but it surely nonetheless provides to a few of these early pacing points.
SteamWorld Quest isn’t going to be the subsequent Slay the Spire, and to be trustworthy, die onerous Spire-ites will in all probability discover its one-and-done story a bit, properly, limiting. But for card novices (which I rely myself considered one of), it’s nonetheless an actual charmer, regardless of how sluggish it would get in these early hours. There’s a lot coronary heart in Image & Form’s games, and SteamWorld Quest is not any exception. When it’s firing on all cylinders, there’s actually one thing fairly enchanting about this robo card battler, and the way in which every card suits collectively makes you really feel like a wizard in return, as for those who’ve glimpsed behind the magician’s curtain and all of the sudden cracked their trick’s internal workings. It is probably not fairly as flawless a efficiency as their peerless SteamWorld Heist, however by the tip it nonetheless left me properly and actually spellbound.
