Deck of Ashes Early Access Preview

On paper, Deck of Ashes is an interesting hybrid. Although turn-based card battles make up its core, there’s also deck building, base management, and even some slight strategy in terms of planning your path through its danger-filled areas. Its art style mixes cartoonish contours with grotesque creatures for a strong first impression, but its first steps into Early Access aren’t all that steady.

The world’s not in such a great state in Deck of Ashes. In their quest for power, a band of brigands called the Outcasts unleashes a curse that turns everyone into monsters. The campaign currently lets you play as one of these brigands, Lucia, reborn into an avatar of flame, with another character set to come at a later date.

Each run starts off at your camp, where several figures await ready to offer a plethora of services. From card crafting to healing, purchasing new stats and much more, it’s a haven and a place to better your chances at surviving out there. Each of these characters can be upgraded using a specific resource found out in the world, giving it all a feeling reminiscent of Darkest Dungeon’s mansion, just minus the cosmic horror flair. Sadly, the glacial pace at which you earn resources, which currently extends to most of the Deck of Ashes’ elements, makes it so that getting even as much as two upgrades during the first chapters is quite challenging, regardless of difficulty.

Once you leave the camp, you find yourself on a map with multiple nodes connected through paths. Most of these nodes house activities, such as ambushes, battles, events or chests that you can open to unlock rewards.  Traveling between nodes also consumes time, which brings the chapter boss closer to you, while also refreshing visited nodes and camp supplies. Where chests reward resources and a card recipe from a selection of three (which can be crafted into a playable card using a resource called Ash), events have an array of different outcomes. Some give you options of using camp facilities while in the field, others grant buffs, debuffs or take away some of your resources. Although I encountered a fair share of events with negative outcomes, such as increasing the chance of a specific type of monster spawn, they didn’t quite have a significant impact on my playthroughs.

Turn-based card battles lie at Deck of Ashes’ core. Whether you’re ambushed or go willingly into combat, all battles unfold as card flinging duels. The areas in which you fight determine what enemies you end up facing, while also coming with mild modifiers that slightly shake up the battles themselves. You can play as many cards as your mana allows during your turn. There’s potential for stringing together combos but the mana limitation, alongside the randomized nature of the decks didn’t allow for anything too crazy in my experience. After completing each turn, you get a chance to shuffle up to three cards back into your deck for a chance of drawing others, potentially better suited for your current situation.

You always know what card the enemy has lined up for their turn, so you can, in theory, plan ahead or play around it. What’s interesting is that used cards go into the Deck of Ash, requiring renewal before they can be used again. Renewing cards can be done during battles, at the cost of noticeable chunks of health, right after fights by using limited resting points, or in camp. The resting points mechanic pushes you into choosing whether you want to heal up or renew needed cards, especially as you push deeper into the game’s chapters. Sadly, when it comes to card variety, Deck of Ashes isn’t all that generous. Not only do you start off with a small deck, but you gain cards at a very slow pace, despite finding them while exploring and being able to purchase them from the merchant. Furthermore, the cards you get are randomized each turn.

This would be an excellent way to constantly refresh playthroughs, but in practice, it currently only limits the player. Deck of Ashes boasts having over 100 cards, but I only saw around 20 or so in 10 hours of play, and flinging the same fireballs over and over again becomes tedious relatively quickly. Not only that, but you can actually end up with half your deck being useless. On a few occasion, a good chunk of my deck was made up of cards whose powerful effects became active while they were in the Deck of Ash. They also couldn’t be played directly and I had no means by which to discard them.

In spite of a fair variety of grotesque enemies and a rather distinct visual style, Deck of Ashes’ combat fails to engage visually due to its severe lack of animations. Aside from some very basic movements that repeat endlessly, there are no discernible animations to actually make you feel like a fight is going on. Instead, it’s just a bland process of playing cards and watching health numbers go down, which never quite lets you feel like you’re fighting for survival or the fate of the world.

Each chapter has an end boss, that’s picked randomly from a pool, which pursues you as you explore. You’ve a limited time to obtain resources and cards, but there’s little pressure felt, for the most part. Although the tutorial suggests that bosses can block paths and wipe out nodes, thwarting your attempts at exploration, the campaign currently doesn’t feature a lot of that. And, while the bosses are stronger opponents, the lack of visual flair and oomph attached to the fights, alongside mechanics that don’t quite set them apart enough from regular foes, make these encounters feel unrewarding.

There’s also a roguelike component to Deck of Ashes, three of its four difficulties triggering restarts (of the chapter or entire campaign) upon death. This is when you can use reward tokens to unlock cards that would, in theory, make things easier. In practice, I never got around to using any of them, being stuck with mostly the same five or six spells for the most part.

Deck of Ashes promises an interesting hybrid of elements taken from great sources of inspiration, but at the moment, things don’t quite work together as well as they should. After ten hours spent battling foes and only barely upgrading both character and camp, the title managed to mildly intrigue but mostly tire. Perhaps the rest of its 100 cards are meant to be found in the third and four chapters, which I only reached once. But even so, its roguelike nature inevitably sends you back to using the same few spells a bit too much as you push through its first chapters. As it turns out, this type of pacing doesn’t quite make for fun card battles with many combos or strategizing potential. Early Access is precisely where things like these can be turned around to unlock their full potential, but at the moment Deck of Ashes is a bit hard to recommend right away.

Bogdan Robert, NoobFeed
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