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Finally there's Aurora, an awesome deck design that's fragile on the face of it but can turn clever cardplay into a stream of healing that becomes damage as she overheals. Seifer's a weird one, a pain-fuelled wolf whose all-out offensives are backed up by demon allies. There's Sorocco, an ogre whose deck is all about shrugging off hits while you wind up a giant punch. Sharra's fast and aggressive, but relatively fragile when you can't manage her tricks to avoid damage. Out there you find gold to use at the shop, magic cubes to draft new cards from, adventure events with weird consequences, and combats to flex your deck's muscles against.Ī new run is a chance to experiment with the characters you pick. With your two picks you move into the book's blank pages, a hex grid, and explore by spending limited brushstrokes and ink splats to reveal unmapped parts of the book. Your deck is a combination of two out of the four characters, each with their own unique card set and talents. Its familiar parts are arranged in a new way with a few clever twists. To its credit, and to its detriment, nothing in Roguebook is particularly novel. Your deck itself even levels up, with your card count giving you points to spend on randomized talents. It even relies on an old deckbuilding staple, asking you to mix-and-match two card pools each run, which was used to such great effect in Monster Train. It has Slay the Spire's flurry of weird artifacts to collect and use. It pulls in a Hades-esque buffet of advanced challenges to mix and match after you first "beat" the game. After hitting certain thresholds, players can choose a new skill from three options that benefit either one of the characters or the party as a whole.Roguebook lifts some great design from other recent roguelite games. Unlike other card battlers, which essentially reward smaller decks that can effectively and consistently pull off a chosen strategy, Roguebook provides actual bonuses for building up a larger deck. Also great are the game's gems, which allow players to craft their own card upgrades, adding a new level of customization for players to experiment with.Īnother feature that sets Roguebook apart is how the game rewards players for expanding their decks during a run through useful upgrades. In combat, players can use certain cards to gain allies, which provide unique skill like allowing the characters to switch positions or dealing damage to the leading enemy at the end of your turn. However, the mechanics is does introduce are pretty compelling. Roguebook is generally a pretty iterative game, building upon the foundations of existing roguelikes and card battlers. It also alleviates some of the frustration associated with having to start from scratch in a roguelike, turning death into as much of a step forward as it is a setback. These provide helpful bonuses without taking away from the game's overall challenging nature. By spending pages before starting a new run, players can unlock new features, like wells that offer more energy or more starting health for their characters. While that game does have elements of progression in the form of new cards and relics that unlock over the course of various runs, Roguebook takes this a step further with its many Embellishments. These permanent upgrades are one area where Roguebook deviates from a game like Slay the Spire. Players will want to have as many advantages as possible, whether that's in the form of additional cards, relics that provide additional abilities and benefits, or pages that allow you to purchase permanent upgrades that are useful in between runs. While there are no random encounters and a path to the chapter's boss is visible from the start, those fights are quite challenging. Managing your supply of paintbrushes and ink is vital. After starting each chapter with five paintbrushes (which reveal a large area around the player's current location), players can explore and fight to gain ink, which reveal more tiles in various patterns. By using magical paintbrushes and ink, players can uncover more of the map's hexagonal tiles, revealing additional cards, fights, relics, healing items and more. Much of the map is hidden at the start of each level, and uncovering as much of it as possible is as important and strategic as the battles themselves. RELATED: 5 Video Games Fans of Magic: The Gathering Will LOVE The pages of the Roguebook are ever-changing, serving as the procedurally-generated map that roguelike players expect. However, rather than going off on a search for this mythical tome, players have become trapped inside of it and must take two heroes (out of a total of four) through the Book to uncover its secrets.
#Roguebook characters full
In this world, there is said to be a Book of Lore full of legends and stories of adventure that was lost in a well. The game is set in the colorful fantasy world created in Abrakam's debut game Faeria.
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