SPOILERS!

Positives:

• The tooltips are very useful, I don’t see enough games with useful tooltips and this one hits the mark very well.
• The tutorial is straightforward and explains things fairly well.
• The SFX and music are nice, I’d like to see more elaborate SFX in the future but so far it all looks good and on-theme.
• The artwork is, for the most part, very nice and fits the game.
• The text crawl goes at a decent pace, but I also like that I can click to speed things up.
• Make choices is good, choosing cards, paths, artifacts, etc. I felt like I had a lot of control over how things progressed whether in story or the gauntlet mode, this is part of what kept me coming back.
• Upgrading cards is really cool, I’ve not seen that before in a virtual card game, admittedly I haven’t played too many though. Every time I reached an upgrade point, I really took my time assessing my cards and determining what my playstyle was.
• Each character plays quite differently which I really like, whilst remaining similar enough that you can grips with each one fairly well after playing one. They all appear to fit their theme well and I was genuinely very excited to see how the next one played each time.
• The game has a fair number of mechanics that aren’t overloaded onto you regardless of whether you play story of gauntlet first. I like that you work up to new mechanics naturally over time and I think you’ve amassed a decent amount that give the game sufficient depth.
• For the most part, the game walks the line between strategic and RNG pretty well, I rarely felt hard done by when it came to RNG and blamed my strategy both in the match and traversing the board for failure.

Things that Might Need Work:

• In the latter part of the story, when you enter the cold area, I forgot the name sorry, the riding enemies appeared too keen to deal damage, I found myself struggling there more than anywhere else in the game. I appreciate that these enemies appear to be focused on a more relentless assault, but I felt like it was too much and I was at the mercy of RNG to defend myself and stay in the fight. I will admit that this was my first playthrough and was still getting to grips with the game and mechanics.
• The limitless card is super fun, firing off all of your cards is really satisfying and can lead to absurd combos with the Elementalist. But the rest of the gauntlet just turn into cakewalk as soon as I got it. I took as many of those cards as I could and I never got even remotely close to death after getting the first, it just felt too powerful.
• The artifact that gives starting enemies Atrophy 3 on start feels too powerful, any time I took that artifact the game became much, much easier. Too easy I would say.
• The balance of classes feels a little off, I found myself fighting for my life as the Agent until I managed to get artifacts which helped carry me and I played that class last. The Elementalist felt overpowered, too many useful combos and ways to negate damage. The Occultist and Vanguard felt pretty balanced overall and they kept to their theming well.

Suggestions:

• Three times during my overall playing of this demo, I accidentally chose a card because I was clicking the centre of the screen when they appeared, I never got to see the other choices and just had to roll with my accidental click. I feel like an “Are you sure?” option would alleviate this and wouldn’t extend playtime by a unreasonable amount.
• This might be an element of personal taste and I hate to rag on something like this as I’m sure someone worked hard on this, but to me the artwork for the female characters don’t appear to fit well with the aesthetic of the rest of the game. They’re just not quite cartoony enough compared to other characters faces, they appear too realistic to me. Apologies to whoever drew this, it’s not necessarily bad it just clashes to me.
• I often forgot that I had hero powers during play, I would personally feel like they would be more likely to be used if the two options were present on your board always, rather than having to click on your hero. This might just be a case of personal taste and my forgetfulness though.
• It might be a good idea to warn players they can never return to shop; I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t be able to do so but I can definitely see some people thinking oh I can save my money for later and come back only to be annoyed that they can’t. A small text prompt could prevent this.
• Unless I am mistaken, the game never explain that cards will cycle back to your hand after use. This might be assumed or understood by players who have played this type of game before, but in many games if your hand runs out you lose. I would suggest adding in a brief mention of this in the tutorial to avoid players getting stressed out in their first battle.
• In the story mode I would suggest more checkpoints. Towards the end, I would get knocked back so far with a loss that it almost killed my enthusiasm to play. In a game with RNG more lenient checkpoints is a must I feel. (Unless you specifically placed them to make you go back a fair bit so that you don’t get stuck in front of a battle that you’re highly unlikely to beat because of poor choices made over the past several battles, shops, etc.)

Potential Bugs:

• 1^st playthrough of gauntlet as the Occultist and the match wouldn’t end after defeating a cyclops and boar.
• 1^st playthrough of gauntlet as the Agent and the match wouldn’t end after defeating a cyclops and boar.
• Summon Wisdom card’s upgrade text box doesn’t fit the text on the upgrade screen when playing as the Occultist in the gauntlet.
• Psychic horror can’t be upgraded yet appears in the upgrade menu.
• As the Elementalist in the gauntlet, I spawned scalds cards and quickly went into Hero powers section and the card’s description became 04000 (I also had a damage boost of +1).

Closing Thoughts:

I had a great time playing this game, I actually continued playing even after I felt like I had done adequate testing as I just found the game very engaging and enjoyed refining my playstyle. I’ll be following your future development, good luck!