My favorite deck builder, and I'm not a great fan of deck builders in general. It nails the vibes, the enemies are nice and the story is good enough. I already 100%'d the game but still crack a run from time to time.

One of the best rogue-lite deck builders out there. Love the lovecraft theme and different decks to play around with. I like that you can create your own deck as well. Could do with more than 3 characters but DLC is in development. Didn't care much for the story but find myself wanting to 100% the game due to the replayability.

This is a combination of Slay the Spire and Darkest Dungeon. From StS you get the base card combat mechanics, like 3 heroes each with own spells, action points, etc. From DD you get base of operations you have to upgrade, and general feel of despair during your runs, when you have to balance multiple resources you have to stay alive (running out of HP is only one of ways to lose a run). It is much more forgiving that DD though.

This game has a story, and meta-progression here is essential for winning (this is primarily because most things that grant you extra action points require unlocking, and without those it's almost impossible to win in Act 3). I personally appreciate that - this creates a sense of progression in the game. In the beginning it feels unfair, and the fact that you survived until Act 2 or 3 and got some valuable resources to upgrade your base is a reward by itself, in the endgame you casually mop the floor with Eldritch Gods :) The middle is the sweet spot imo - when you can competently try to beat anything, but you are not yet strong enough to beat everything. You found a way to reliably heal yourself? There are enemies that sit back and drain your sanity instead. You like to stack free attacks for a crazy combo multiplier? Welcome enemies that grow stronger every time they're hit. You've surrounded yourself with summons that distract your attackers while you build up - how about monsters that start a fight with a flurry of AoE attacks? You'd need learn to recognise these scenarios and figure out how to get out of sticky situations before these become dire - which you again usually do by burning resources. I quite like how different resources have different value at different times. In some cases, losing sanity can feel as a step towards inevitable demise, and during some other runs you'll burn through it as if it is mana.

The game has quite large number of different resources, mechanics and status effects - dozens really, much more than in Slay The Spire. This is cool because it allows you different things to build around and more things to consider, but at the same time - cards now need to support a much wider set of mechanics, so there is less depth in each individual one. E.G. there is only a handful of cards that inflict burn, so I don't think there are many different ways to build it - you just stack everything that improves burning into THE burn build. Each character has multiple starting decks that build around different themes those characters have, + there is an option to draft your starting deck yourself, which is a fantastic feature (you get 17 picks out of packs of 3, and then can remove 2). Deck bloat is the issue, but there are way to remove cards you don't need, contrary to what people write in comments.

My only grudge with the game is that there is not much to do in the late game. In the beginning, while runs are difficult and usually end in defeat, the game showers you with unlockables and upgrades, which makes up for that. After you get to around level 15 - you can start killing Cthulhu, but once you get to level 25 - there is pretty much nothing to do anymore, all cards and artefacts are unlocked, and the only thing left to unlock all the way to lvl 50 is characters' backstories, which are not that interesting.