I am hopelessly in love with Orik. SteamWorld Quest has heroes instead of classes – a handful of lovable clanking misfits, each of whom bring their own decks and their own focus to the turn-based card battling that makes up the campaign. They’re all brilliant. One of them hammers with massive fists and heals with boundless love. Another inflicts shrapnel wounds by literally pelting foes with money. Then there’s Orik. Orik the elegant mystery man with the masks. He stands tall and straight, always, seemingly, attentive and yet easy – if that combination is possible. When he strikes, his rapier shifts from stance to stance, slicing baddies to courtly ribbons. The masks change as the moves change, each with its own bonus which lasts to the end of a turn. His deck takes a while to understand, but it is wonderfully brisk and wounding when you get your head around it. The word for Orik is decisive. His sense of poise gives poise. He is never out of my line-up.
SteamWorld Quest reviewDeveloper: Image & Form GamesPublisher: Thunderful PublishingPlatform: SwitchAvailability: Out on Switch on 25th of April
A card-battling RPG would have felt like a niche concern a while back, but Hearthstone happened, and then Slay the Spire and a dozen more. Do you need another of these games in your life? When it’s from the SteamWorld team, yes you do, I think. SteamWorld games take an established genre and fill it with robots and palpable character. Previous entries have tackled platformers and turn-based tactics. This time we’re in the robotic dark ages following a band of knockabout losers on a mission to prove themselves heroes. And they do that with cards.
Punchcards, because this is robots we’re talking about. Selecting a team of three heroes – you can swap them out from a cheerful gaggle whenever you fancy – you rove around beautiful 2D environments taking in glades, grottoes, haunted libraries and the like, and you battle awful beasts and bullies as you work through the various chapters of a surprisingly long and involved campaign. Each hero – I mean this term in the loosest sense – has its own deck, which grows throughout the course of the game as you find new cards or craft them or even upgrade oldies with the materials you find lying around. Even from the off, though, they bring wonderfully distinct forms of righteous violence to each encounter.
In a move that reminds me of XCOM with its two-actions simplicity, each turn in combat sees you selecting three cards to either deal damage, buff or debuff, or heal. Each hero’s cards are distinct and they’ll all be pleasantly jumbled in your hand. Do you want something from the robot who specialises in flame and frost and electricity? Or do you want the one who sometimes wounds herself as she inflicts pain on her foes? The first layer of complexity comes with the mana system, which is called steam here. Some cards come with no steam cost, which means that actually allow you to build steam, one point for each card you play. Other cards with steam costs will slowly become available as you earn enough points to play them. Steam cost cards tend to be the most devastating, and so steam management was an early fixation of mine. Something bright and rewarding to focus on during starter battles, and to ponder after my first defeats.