Rogue Light Deck Builder: Less of a Roguelike Card Game, More of a Desperate Plea

“There are too many games,” is a phrase often heard from people who wish to rustle the jimmies of leftists who contend that overabundance and scarcity are market constructs. It’s not something you’ll hear from me, but I do think there are quite a lot of one type of game, a game that spawns incessantly within the corrupted magic circle of my inbox, as though I were playing out a scripted last stand against insurmountable odds. That game is the roguelike deckbuilder.

Once upon a time, I thought “roguelike deckbuilder” had a certain robust poetry to it. Now, the syllables strike my ears like the banging of icebergs against a foundering hull. Each new arrival harrows with the thought of a hundred deaths, a hundred unlocks, a hundred fresh descents, all of it spiked with this season’s flavour of supporting fiction or subgenre – what’s for tea, Mother? Soulslikes on toast?

I do still enjoy these games, especially the ones that genuinely have some kind of imaginative twist, and I mean no offence to their creators, but I’ve run out of ways to distinguish them using the puny English language. So I’m glad that Rogue Light Deck Builder is here to hold up a mirror to my aggravation.

In Rogue Light Deck Builder, you hammer together a wooden balcony in the flickering glow of a dodgy bulb. A joke like that probably doesn’t need a whole game to deliver it, but the Steam demo amused me regardless. Here’s how it works: you line up a nail with your floating hand cursor, and smash it in by yanking your mouse around as though trying to free it from the mouth of a resentful dog. The hammer connects with a rubbery animal squeak. It vaguely sounds as though you’re crucifying Pikachu.

In a nice send-up of Borderlandsy RPGs with their geysers of damage numerals, words such as “perfect” and “OK” flop out on impact and settle squidgily on the boards like condemned sausages, to be absently brushed around as you thwack in nails. There are also bugs you can splat, and special nails with clover stems that (I think) bestow bonus earnings. Much of the time, of course, you’ll clobber your own hand, which deducts an “Ouch” from the invoice emerging from a printing calculator in top left.

You are doing all this at the behest of your “husband”, a molten Dark Souls cadaver seated behind a marble desk. He has upgrades to sell, including more resilient hands, more accurate hammers, and slightly less dodgy bulbs. Each time you exit the store the deck needs to be built again. Beyond it sways a suffocating horizon of cyanotype foliage. The priciest unlock is a key that costs one million dollars and is labelled “escape”.

Try it for yourself here. The full game is out 17th March. Sorry for moaning about roguelike deckbuilders, developers! It’s partly that I seldom have time to dig into each one and work out what sets it apart. When all you have is the hammer of overwhelm, everything starts to look like the nail of diminishing returns.