Pyrene

An entertaining little card game, but lacks the depth to have real staying power. Notionally a deckbuilder, but this plays more like a solitaire card game. Move around a grid of cards, attacking enemies, collecting goodies and grabbing your equipment (which can affect enemies, give healing or have other effects). Then you rest, the grid is refilled with more cards and you continue until you clear the area. Runs are quite short, just 8-10 fights, well under an hour. There are lots of relics and equipment, with a ton of different ways to customise them – you can upgrade, duplicate, add effects and more. There are 11 playable characters each with unique mechanics. After completing the campaign there are challenge runs to do and difficulty modifiers to make it more challenging. So why not an enthusiastic thumbs up? Here’s the unfortunate secret – tactics don’t matter, strategy doesn’t matter, positional play doesn’t matter. The game just comes down to assembling a broken combo of equipment and relics. This is fun at first if you enjoy breaking the game – stacking double digit poison on enemies, amassing 20 dodge to make yourself invulnerable, piling on bleed to do massive damage with one hit. The problem is that’s all there is to it. All you’re doing is looking for a killer combo, and once you’ve got it, you just execute every fight until you win. The enemies have a range of different skills, but they’re mostly irrelevant because your cards and combos are killing everything. It’s not that it’s not fun but it’s just not deep enough to want to play over and over. Still was an entertaining ride, but now I’ve finished the campaign, I’m not sure how much more there is here.

Pyrene is a very unique, creative, and fun roguelike that's worth a play-through. There's a wide variety of different characters where you have to adjust tactics a bit, but generally you just try to go for similar combo breaking builds (which honestly seems normal to me for these type of roguelikes) because it either feels like you have a busted run or just not enough to do anything but must be hard to create a balance when RNG is a main aspect of the genre. I did like how this game has a luck stat which increases your chances of getting specific relics/cards that synchronize with your current build. The game also does open up a quite a bit as you unlock new cards, relics, and characters through various in-game tasks which was nice. For replayability, it does include various increasing difficulty adjustments and challenges with each of the characters, if you are seeking more to do after initial completion of the game. Overall, would recommend! The music drove me a little crazy though. XD

This game is really good ! Can't stop playing it ! I just wish there was an endless mode where we can really maxed out our card and where the enemy get harder and harder. I'm sad when a good run end.

Kinda surprised me at how fun and relaxed this game is. I completed the main story at my current playtime (14 hours). The first 2 runs (characters) were the hardest for me by far. It was fun when figuring out (and getting favourable RNG) on builds. Great art style and one of the more laid back card games I've played.

Fun deckbuilding roguelike. My only complaint is that all of the characters suck other than the starting one.

I think this has potential but the design is too simplistic. You just move around bashing monster HP and healing. Maybe it gets better a few hours in, but I don't have the patience to play a boring game until then.

Creative card game un-like any others

I like the diversity of the characters.

Fabulous. For those of you deckbuilding maniacs who want something new!

good game, lots of depth

pretty good