Made me interested in the genre for the first time! Masterful card mechanics, immaculate presentation, and heartfelt story. Given its unique strengths, Steamworld Quest might really be Steam's best.
Page-turners they were not.
Image & Form Games have the extra-extraordinary ability to make you fall in love with genres you thought you didn't care for. Like roaming heroes, they pivot from genre to genre, slaying the issues with ease and leaving everything in their wake nigh-on perfect. It's enough to make you sick!
'So it's another card battle-deckbuilder game - who cares!', you say. One, watch your tone with me, and two, it's a flipping good one! One that over thirty hours gradually chipped away at me until I'm now an unrecognisable convert. I could never even get interested in a Slay The Spire or Battle Chasers; now they're all calling for me!
The name of the game is party-based, fantasy punch-card (clever double entendre) battling. Your assessment of the mechanics here will probably hinge on your contact with other games, but I found the depth present sufficiently, and sometimes wildly, satisfying. It pulls off the trick of injecting most of its depth outside of battles in the deckbuilding - setting up character synergies and card combinations to exploit and swapping out your party/deck for different situations. For a veteran Spire player, the more 'automatic' nature of battles might be disappointing. There's slightly less to think about... less that can go wrong - it's simpler for sure. For me, it was the perfect compromise and effectively charmed me into the genre when Spire couldn't. Twenty to thirty hours of highly story-contextual content over hundreds of hours poured into your gullet was always going to win out for me, at least for now!
This isn't to say the battles don't have anything to consider. Far from it! Deckbuilding is merely setting up dominoes for the perfect deployment opportunities later, so you still have to know how to use them effectively! There is nothing more satisfying than using three of a single character's cards in a single turn (the default limit of cards that can be activated) to access their bonus card (achieving a combo), using character/card synergies for extra damage, exploiting enemy elemental weaknesses, etc. The emphasis is perhaps more on achieving these combos than any interplay between characters. It almost always seems more useful to use only one character's cards in a turn. Perhaps this was done so you had sufficient freedom to choose your favourite party members rather than be forced into taking advantage of specific synergies. I would have still been interested in more examples, however, since it might have helped combat any feelings of going through the motions in battle.
I never needed to be fist-faced to hate mushrooms.
The biggest factor to consider is the gear system. Every card that doesn't cost you gears affords you one gear, other cards cost gears proportional to their usefulness, and some are neutral. Battles encourage a tactical consideration of deploying smaller cards to build up gears for current/future opportunities. Manage your deckbuilding poorly or lack restraint in using your cards at hand and you might find you're often without any zero-cost cards in your hand to perform an action at all. You get a small reprieve in the ability to make two exchanges of cards per turn. This has a satisfying gambling quality to it if you wish to use it to optimise your turn (and not out of necessity), whilst also limiting the effect lady luck has on your initial shuffle.
Battles often became a psychological fight of resisting the high damage solutions to instead play more conservatively. Instead of achieving a combo you should use a healing card/potion or generate shields. Instead of deploying gear-costing cards you should build up your gear number for better opportunities down the line by using zero-cost cards and perhaps decrease your enemies' defence/boost yours whilst you're at it. In the truest move of investing in the future, you can use a card that allows you an extra card to play in the next turn. Some battles are an absolute war of attrition, for which preserving your party members whilst dealing out only occasional damage is just necessary. Enemy types are varied with some truly excellent mechanically. My favourite is the ticking time bomb which passively gains its own gears over turns until spending them on exploding for extraordinary damage - unless you destroy it first, of course. It's this kind of wrench in the works - like the bombs, heavy damage dealers, or healing enemies - that forces you to have to constantly adjust strategy and make priorities. There's an ever-present risk-reward dynamic at play. Save points fully restore your health when you discover them in level exploration. In this way, the handfuls of fights between checkpoints become a survival gauntlet wherein health maintenance is key. So you don't completely have to rely on the luck of the draw or compromise your attack combos, you can also buy potions and revives at the merchant who tirelessly follows you to the ends of the earth. This comes at the heavy cost of gold - eating into your ability to upgrade and purchase cards. Always something to consider!
Never be someone's best customer if you don't want to be stalked.
So, simpler than other games in the genre I might call it, maybe, but it's true that these battle considerations aren't just optional optimisation - a tincture of bonus damage here and there - for on the hardest difficulty your survival in the chapter will absolutely be contingent on your understanding of the minutiae of the cards. The bosses, in particular, are brutal so-and-sos and bring out the absolute best in the game's systems. The war of attrition as you suffer horrendous damage, the risk-reward of healing compromising high damage plays which could finish them off sooner - the gears, combos, synergies, weaknesses, etc. My only complaint is that the final two bosses seem a few rungs higher in difficulty than the rest of the game. I'm not too ashamed to say that I had to resort to turning down the difficulty just to see the end and get this written (I still struggled). Admittedly, more and more as the game progressed, I found myself reliant on potions and revives just to get by. On my part, I think perhaps that my deck wasn't optimal with too many high-cost cards and not enough defensive ones. Never in the game did I have to grind, but the final bosses do suggest that I might have needed to. Overall, I'm glad the game has these high-level challenges and I look forward to revisiting them one day to complete the game to my true satisfaction!
Speaking of levelling, levelling up does feel slightly out of place to me. Purely because it's just so uninteresting in how it merely adds to damage and health stats. Focus on three of your gang for too long and you'll suddenly find a slight level disparity in your party if you reintroduce a long-abandoned one. It doesn't feel necessary. Cards, not attached to this levelling, thankfully, are introduced in three ways. Included throughout are very clever scripted character moments that will generate apposite cards that reflect the said events. This very nicely takes advantage of the story element that most of Quest's contemporaries don't boast, and so too is the story boosted by having such character moments necessitated mechanically. There's also the slow trickle of card options at the merchant as the game progresses, which whilst not as standout, makes visiting the merchant constantly a treat since you never know what interesting cards will arrive to flip everything on its head. One of my favourites is still one the very high-cost card that saps an enemy of all of their health - bar one. It's the kind of card you can know will be coming and plan around. You're able to buy Stat-boosting or ability granting equipment and weapons.
Why use a sword when you can get value for money?
The weapons like the levelling are close to being entirely uninteresting unequivocal stat increases for each character, but are saved by allowing you to pick the bonus card you're granted upon achieving a combo. So too are there some interesting pieces of equipment - allowing you to get an act of revenge upon damage, for instance. Cards and equipment can actually also be found in the environment with some deft use of foreground to obscure hidden areas. This makes exploration frequently quite exciting. Level maps are brimming with bonus areas and you're never too sure of the direction you need to perforce go or what you'll find.
Compared to say Slay The Spire, Quest's sheer hand-drawn pulchritude is where it veritably has the edge. You need only look at the screenshots to see for yourself how it excels in this department. Colours pop, lighting impresses, and character and monster designs really shine. The soundtrack can be repetitive - mostly so with its battle music - but it's still fundamentally great stuff. It's later used to really great effect with familiar motifs being reintroduced into new moody environment or exciting story tracks.
The story, split into many more chapters than I ever expected to encounter, is stuffed full of the light humour you might expect of a Steamworld game but gives every character moments of drama and doubt. It explores what it means to be a true hero in its sweet, heartfelt way and actually brings the story to some interesting places. It's a relief since I found I wasn't connecting with the characters at all for a good few hours, but when it finally clicked I was consuming everything they had to say with glee. By making the story really revolve around the characters rather than them being merely incidental, you feel like you're bonding with them on multiple levels - through your understanding of how they play, their interactions, and the revelations they have. It's great that this isn't in any way just a placeholder plot.
Everything is fine...
Quest was a surprise game for me. Getting me interested in a genre I had previously dismissed was no small feat. It did so with its masterful card mechanics - finely balancing accessibility with depth; its immaculate presentation, and the humour-filled, heartfelt story, which acts as an antidote to the usual roguelike trappings of the genre. Given its unique strengths, Steamworld Quest might really be Steam's best.
