Roguelike deck-building
🛡️ Honor’s End is a brand new upcoming game from IV Studio . After hearing the thematic background of the game I kind of came in expecting something like Tainted Grail, but the game is much more akin to e.g. Aeon’s End. This is a boss-battler, with a playthrough consisting of 3 fights of increasing difficulty, with you of course also improving in strength and versatility as you go along this journey. 💪 While you can play just randomly generated games kind of like a ‘roguelike’, you can also play through a campaign, where a screenplay-like story connects each chapter, and you unlock new components.
The game uses deck-building and a unique, well-flowing card-connecting combo system that is really entertaining. 🙃 Each round your current enemy acts according to a track and icons on the enemy card itself - which is mostly about adding threat dice or taking wound cards - then players get to act, simultaneously playing their cards as they best see fit. ⚔️
By default you can only start a single line of cards, and many cards have an arrow that lets you add other cards to their right, chaining them. 🔗 Other effects might let you start a new line, so you can continue comboing. 🧐 You can also tuck cards under other cards to activate tuck-abilities, raising the flexibility of the system.
There are a bunch of possible effects on cards: damage 💥 to decrease the life of the enemy, shields 🛡️ to “defuse” threat dice that you got from the threat pool, additional card draw 🃏, Temple ✝️ or Monarchy ⚜️ symbols to earn resources you can exchange for bonuses and new cards for your deck, or you could get Inspiration dice 🎲 that can help you out in a pinch.
Undefended threat dice can either give you wound 🩸 cards that clog up your deck, or decrease the Honor 👑 track. Take too long, run out of Honor or deplete the supply of wound cards and you lose! ☠️ Successfully defeat the 3rd enemy and you win! 🏆
So how does this sound?
Engaging card combat gameplay accompanied by an overarching story, with cards you can unlock as you go. 😉
A prototype of this game was kindly shared by the publisher for us to try out. Just a heads-up: all the components are prototypes, so things might look or play a bit differently in the final version. For more details, check out our content policy.
