Tainted Grail: Conquest

A story-driven roguelike deckbuilder based on Arthurian legends.

Why

Why not

Impressions

This is a neat little game, and if I played it before Hades/Slay the Spire/with more free time I probably would've finished it. As someone with a full time job and hundreds of hours in two of the best roguelikes made though, nothing about this one stuck out enough to keep me playing.

I unlocked 4 or so of the 9 classes and the 'true' boss in my 8 hours of playtime, but didn't find enough challenge or interesting mechanics compelling me to finish the job. The persistent feeling of jank created by an unpolished feeling UI, featureless area maps and frequent frame rate dips on the basic looking attack animations didn't help my motivation either.

Story & Mechanics

That's not to say this is a bad game though. I enjoyed the story and voice-acting, especially the goat-like god(?) who provides you a body and set of goals to pursue while totally having no ulterior motives of his own. The first few classes I unlocked had a variety of interesting mechanics to build their decks around.

An example of this is your ultimate, a once per turn ability strengthened by charges gained through doing something core to the class' theme. For example the archer class gains a charge per arrow fired, and can consume those charges to fire a high damage barrage. What makes these ults interesting is the way they tend to get more efficient as they gain charges, so that firing an arrow barrage with 3 charges might do just enough to finish off an enemy on death's door, firing a full 12 charge salvo will finish any regular fight by the time you get there. Add in cards only played by consuming ult charges, and their presence as a secondary resource to the classic mana pool adds a lot of strategic depth.

Unfortunately my time with the game was brought to an end by discovering the blood mage class I'd just unlocked was essentially the summoner with added self-harm. As in the summons were just recolored models with slightly different drawbacks. If the trend of later classes being minor variations on those already available it seems like a missed opportunity to have fewer, deeper classes. The blood mage might have been better merged with the summoner to create multiple approaches to building the same class, whereas on most runs I felt there were pretty clear 'best' cards and power ups to take.

Conclusion

Overall, a cool game that could have been better. I enjoyed the 8 hours I spend with it, and if you're a fan of roguelikes or deckbuilders it's almost certainly worth the sale price of ~400yen. Personally I didn't find anything to justify the time investment of a roguelike over the hundreds of games in my backlog (or just another few runs of the Spire), but if the style or mechanics appeal to you maybe you will.