There is an option to flee from any normal battle, which makes you sit through an enemy turn, but that can leave you in a pretty rough spot through no fault of your own. Generally the enemies in an area tend to follow a certain theme, which is appreciated, but figuring out that theme can be frustrating. There’s occasions where an enemy joins the battle once it’s initiated that has an elemental strength or weakness, or some card that your deck can’t do anything about thanks to the characters you’ve selected. My first issue is that, thanks to the way enemy encounters work, it’s possible to get blindsided by an enemy that your current active party is entirely unequipped to handle. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work, thanks to some small issues that can grind everything to a halt. It’s never overwhelming and makes it easy to experiment or completely respec a character. The eight card deck limit is probably the best design decision in the game. When it all works, it’s a really fun, crunchy system with interesting decisions almost every turn. Of course, like any decent card game, there are cards that bend these systems, too. But maybe you have a card with an extra effect that triggers if played after a card of another character, which prevents you from getting that chain effect. However, if you play three cards from the same character, a chain effect is triggered, based on the weapon they have equipped. Beyond steam costs, you are limited to playing three cards per turn. These cards are your basic attacks and (de)buffs, but as you unlock more cards from crafting and questing some more interesting options come into play. Steam builds by playing cards that do not have a Steam cost in their upper-right corner. SteamWorld Quest’s take on deckbuilding card costs is Steam, represented by a series of cogs that light up at the top of the screen as Steam builds. The battle begins, and a hand of your selected characters’ cards are drawn. (The damage is pretty marginal, which is a blessing because the otherwise gorgeous paper doll art style makes it incredibly challenging to line up the hits.) Enemies roam these screens, and making contact with one begins a battle, with the option to do a little damage if you manage to hit them with the attack button before they run into you. Outside of battle, you control one of your party members and move through a series of connected screens, almost like a beat-em-up. Of your available characters, you select three as your active party via the pause menu outside of battle. Each character has a general archetype, with no cards shared between characters. Each character has an ever-expanding selection of cards, of which you choose eight to build their deck for battle. Here are the basics: You have a pool of characters in your party, that grows over the course of the story. The story and cast are nice, but with a deckbuilding game, what keeps me going is the actual building of decks, y’know? SteamWorld Quest has some pretty cool takes on the deckbuilding RPG concept, but not quite all of it comes together. I enjoyed the super expressive paper doll-style animation especially. The art is gorgeous, as all the HD entries in the series have been. Unfortunately, the game’s relative brevity (10-20 hours depending on how thorough you want to be/how hard of a time you have) doesn’t give the characters much room to grow, especially those introduced later in the game. The story beats are by the numbers, but the main cast of characters are charmingly written and generally inoffensive. The story is your classic “ragtag crew of quirky youths band together to stop an apocalypse after their town gets sacked” story, but like the rest of the SteamWorld games, everyone is a robot. SteamWorld Quest is a deckbuilding RPG that bucks recent trends in the subgenre by eschewing roguelike design for a traditional linear narrative. My fingers are crossed, because I really wanted to love this game. However, with some small tweaks, I think Image & Form could turn things around. It’s like the uncanny valley effect-the game is so close to being great that all the little flaws became much more glaring. (Go play SteamWorld Heist right now, if you haven’t.) But there’s a stack of little imperfections that compounded and held me back from enjoying the game as much as I thought I would. By any measure, SteamWorld Quest should be extremely my jam-it’s a deckbuilding RPG, it’s on the Switch, and it’s the latest game in one of the low-key best game series in recent memory. It’s one thing to be let down by a game you’re excited for but quite another when it’s so excruciatingly close to being great… but ends up only okay.
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