Played The Royal Writ
The main thing I have to say about this game is that it looks incredible - like an animated children's picture book, full of silly and undignified little characters wearing silly clothes and bearing silly names. Just look at it:
It's a deckbuilding card game with Balatro-style scoring. Some cards which increment a blue point value, and others which increment a red multiplier. Your score is calculated across the entire army on the field at once and each turn, cards advance forward. The more turns that have passed, the more cards you're able to get on the field at once, so the higher your score can ramp.
The scoring system is obviously familiar, but this game does try hard to be twisty and surprising. There are a dizzying number of strange and strangely-named buffs and debuffs, some of which are advantageous only in highly specific circumstances. Many bosses change the basic match formula or surprise you with mechanics you won't see anywhere else. There is one goose boss which takes your end-turn button away, and puts your turn on a timer instead, so that you have to play as many cards as possible before it screams and advances to the next turn. The game's final boss will stretch his arm up into the sky and slide it back down over your game board, blocking your ability to play cards every few turns. You can make your cards "educated," which causes them to become negative (and multiply together into a positive score) but incompatible with any "uneducated" cards (which would still be positive). All the characters are pathetic and weird and the card abilities are often amusingly self-defeating. It's cute stuff.
It also kills the cards in your deck constantly. The play field has a series of rows which all lead to a set of enemy fortification. Any card which hits the fortifications will die, so the number of columns in the play field double as a kind of timer until your cards start dying against the walls. The last time I got to the final boss, my Act 2 run had involved losing 22 cards total.
Oh, and the game has two modes - Act 1, which is fairly straightforward, and Act 2, which adds a surprising number of new mechanics. In Act 2, the enemy will periodically fire bullets at you down the rows, and you've got a new "morale" stat which decreases every time a bullet reaches the end of a row. At low morale values, most of the board-based multipliers which affect your score as the army advances will get turned off. You also have a "duck" button which allows you to either let a bullet pass over your characters, or hit them, which does damage and deletes the bullet. So you get to choose which bullets hit which characters, and when. You can only duck an entire row at once, which adds another layer... and some of the bullets are actually beneficial, which is also funny. It adds so many new, strange things to the game! I was very surprised to discover this mode.
If this game continues to launch on my computer, I will be glad to continue playing it until I beat the final boss. My only complaints:
- The game crashes most of the times I launch it on my PC. No idea what's going on there. This computer is less than a year old!
- There is a cute little animation that occurs to the damage value pre-calculation every time you change the board state before committing a turn. However the animation displays one number of the damage value at a time, starting from the 1s column. So every time you change the board state during your turn, you have to wait several seconds for it to tap out the whole value of your attack in the pre-calculation area. If I could instantly see the value of my board I would probably like this game 50% more than I already do.