Griftlands (2020)

Playtime: 1h53m

Intro

Griftlands is a roguelike deckbuilding game. You play through various quests by picking locations on a map. At these locations you can buy/talk/heal or deal with enemies through battles or negotiations (basically, weirder battles).

Lots of "stuff"

Griftlands has a lot of things going on. There are hundreds of cards. There are two different battle systems, one of which i still don't really get. There are bonuses and penalties based on how people and factions feel about you. There are cards and grafts (permanent bonuses) to buy. You can bribe people, provoke people, pick from several options in encounters, upgrade cards in one of two ways, et cetera.

Compounding mistakes

This would all be great, but not in a roguelike that can take 6-10 hours to complete with health/will that doesn't consistently regenerate and limited opportunities. I constantly feel like the sword of Damocles is hanging over my head and making mistakes is going to come back and bite me in the ass hours and hours later - which would mean having to re-do everything. Especially the healing thing kills it for me. If your game is more than 1-2 hours long it shouldn't have permanent health with few ways of regaining it.

Sword card, shield card

Also, i generally dislike the whole "cards are attacks" thing. It means combat isn't going to involve units/summons and there likely won't be any keywords aside from maybe armor/DOT effects. Combat mostly becomes a simple numbers game. The only game that did this well was Northmark: Hour of the Wolf, because the cards had a lot of variety and the game was pretty short (and not bloody rogueshit).

Conclusion

I like my card games quick, short and with a bunch of variety. Griftlands does the opposite. But hey, if you really like Slay the Spire you will probably like this.

5/10

I've heard from so many people that this is a great game in the deckbuilder genre, but i just didn't enjoy it.

It's very pretty to look at, but I don't think I was willing to put the time in to figure out the systems that would have otherwise made it enjoyable for me.

Oh well, the good thing is, I have a backlog a mile long and I'm sure to find something to entertain me!

~David.

I played and finished this game on Switch. If you like card games or roguelikes (or both), you HAVE to play this game. Seriously, it's not a well-known game, and at first i didn't expect much. But this game blew me away!

It has fun characters, amazing world-building, story with branching paths, an astounding amount of cards and many ways to build your decks around different mechanics.

It has different decks for negotiation and battle, and often you have the choice of whether to negotiate with an NPC or fight them. This can change the story progression a lot.

All in all, I LOVED this game. I wish more people played it. I'd buy a DLC or a sequel in a heartbeat.