Roots Devour’s demo harbours the seeds of a brilliant horror card RPG

I had trouble sleeping last night, due to a combination of press trip excitement, chugging too many complimentary coffees, and my hotel room being opposite a strange, insistently symmetrical building that reared over my dreams like Sauron’s penthouse. So to settle my nerves, I got up and played a game about being a horrible tree. Just the worst tree. A total shit of a tree. That game was Roots Devour – and great news, if you’re having trouble sleeping you can play it too, for there is a demo in the wilds.

Roots Devour is a vegetal horror cardgame in which you, a monstrous sapling grown from the mind-flaying manure of the Lovecraft mythos, spread your tendrils through a forest, harvesting fluids from its creatures and working your way up the food chain until you are top Tam-ash, Oakranos or [insert superior Lovecraft tree pun here]. To do this, you click-drag roots between cards. The basic constraints are, firstly, that you need a clear line of sight between cards, so you’ll need to expand around obstacles such as dense rival root networks, and secondly, that you need blood to grow, and each unfortunate lifeform you snare only has so much to share.

Sometimes, the poor critters split under your embrace, forming fussy piles of limbs that must be scooped up individually. So inconsiderate. When they’re drained of blood, they continue to serve you as nodes in your root network, dangling like hairy dried fruits from your boughs. Roots Devour’s presentation is perfectly icky, like Cultist Simulator but with deep gushing notes of Bram Stoker. It’s also localised from Chinese, so even if you’re hip to cosmic monsters, you might have a bit of trouble figuring out the tutorial and lore text.

As you expand, you’ll amplify your capacities with card packs that award various boons. A card that harbours digestive fluids, for example, will allow you to seize and pacify a larger beast such as a deer. A card that harbours a source of florescence will let you see cards from further off. Some of these card packs are awarded by a mysterious human-looking ally, Flora, who appears immune to your predations, and is capable of sucking vitality from you in turn. Between stages, you can also retreat to your sylvan heart of hearts and expend biomatter to level up.

Roots Devour did not help me sleep, but it did make me feel less unnerved about that mildly eldritch building across from my hotel. I’m watching it now. I wrote “insistently symmetrical” before, but now that I look closely, none of the windows appear to be the same shape. Still, at least it’s not, e.g., an absolute king-hell shitlord of a tree. The full version of Roots Devour launches this year, and you can read more on Steam.