4 hours ago
3
Slay the Spire 2 may yet prove this year's best deckbuilder, but The Killing Stone is more intriguing. It's also heckin' Elizabethan, if you opt for the "period" dialogue option. The setup, in present-day English: it's the 17th century, and you are a student of the great occultist Mariken Svangård. As is the fashion among occultists, your mentor has just popped her clogs in mysterious circumstances, and you've come to a bizarre mansion in the Antarctic circle to pay respects and meet her relatives. It turns out that Mariken has somehow sold their souls to various demons, foremost among them a snickering, one-eyed fiend who looks like Guido Fawkes by way of Doctor Strange.
Your task is to save all the hellbound Svangårds before the vigil is over, by defeating their devils over the course of nodular, branching roguelite campaigns. These campaigns don't consist of magical duels - they're characterised as a series of haggling matches while picking through a diabolical contract, which unfurls like molted snakeskin from the ceiling of Mariken's secret workshop. As you advance your blood-stained eyeglass from clause to clause, section to section, you'll beat the presiding demon in lawyerly card battles and add fresh packs to your deck, some of which harbour cursed cards that insist on being played, once drawn.
The contract law framing is to some degree just set dressing for mechanics you've seen in a bunch of other roguelites – do you pick the campaign branch that leads to a basic card upgrade, or the one with an elite minion battle and a juicier, "Transcendent" reward? - but I love the suggestion throughout that I am besting the underworld's legions by noting that Satan spelled "damnation" with three "m"s in paragraph 16. I also enjoy the blend of menace and petulance you get from your demon opponents, who fume and fidget in the corner of the view while you're combing the fine print for loopholes (aka, upgrades). A lot of their incidental dialogue basically consists of grumping at you for being a goddamn weasel pettifogger.
The turn-based battles themselves are closer to Monster Train than Slay the Spire. Creatures summoned with cards are placed on a battleline with six slots, split between the warring parties. Each player gets a magic eye – yours was once the property of Guido Strange, above. These are placed at either end of the line to serve as a 'home base', with minions killing each other until they have a clear shot at the opposing eyeball's health bar. Let them smash your eyeball and it's Game Over, with the option to restart the ritual entirely or resume where you left off in return for some Revelation currency.
There's also a Reserve line, where you can plonk reinforcements that move automatically into the battle line when creatures they're adjacent to are slain. Creatures aside, you can park modifiers in Reserve that confer passive or reactive boosts of various kinds. Nurturing the chemistry between the main and Reserve line is crucial to success; Reserved creatures generally can't attack directly, but they're also harder to injure as well.
Many of the cards continue the Ally McBeezelbub theme. There is actually a creature called Fine Print, for instance. It's a clockwork arachnid that can only be deployed in Reserve, with the advantage that you can pop it on the enemy's side of the field. Which means that when you kill the creature directly below Fine Print, your spiderbot will occupy its slot with the smugness of a barrister dredging up a forgotten precedent, breaking the enemy formation and thereby ruining card synergies that rely on adjacency (yes, I have reached the point in my resurgent deckbuilder enthusiasm where I wield the word "synergy" without irony – truly, I am lost to the fiends).
There are many such feats of indirectness to enjoy in The Killing Stone. Derelict Fortress is a big stubborn tower that has no inherent combat knack beyond toppling forward when killed, crushing enemy units in front of it. An excellently surly defender/punisher, then - and you can always destroy it yourself with a lightning bolt card to hurry things along. Conquerer Wyrm is a breeder, excreting a fresh combat maggot for every mook murdered. This is great for autobattler-esque swarming strategies, but also means losing control over your team composition.
As regards the roguelite map element, The Killing Stone is quite by-the-numbers – again, one branch always has more risk, for more reward - but a nifty constraint is that you don't get to modify or trade cards individually. You can only swap packs for packs, not cards for cards. Upgrades and curses affect cards within each pack at random. So there is a fractal element of customising or discarding a dozen mini-decks within your deck. And also, a real sense of profit and loss when trading card packs, because you'll rarely own a pack entirely made up of unwanted cards.
Packs containing cursed cards can't be traded away, but often contain a few extra-valuable cards as well, tempting you to sacrifice deck flexibility for power. And then there are the run-length buffs and debuffs you'll gamble for with the opposing demon, each participant placing chips on boons and hexes they want enacted or banished.
It's a fine set of tactical wrinkles. Still, I don't think there's quite the range of card combo possibilities you find in Spire. Partly, it's that the roguelite maps aren't procedurally generated – they're more like puzzles, at times, asking you to 'solve' particular opposing decks. And partly it's that this is a heavily story-led game in which each run forms part of a fight for somebody's eternal wellbeing. Both those last observations can be spun as advantages, of course. Perhaps you're already playing Slay the Spire 2, and are hungry for a deckbuilder with more definition and narrative impetus.
Speaking of narrative impetus, The Killing Stone lets you switch between a script written in "modern prose" and a period option that does a good job of being Shakespearean, in that it is alternately sparkling and exhausting. Samuel Johnson once commented that wordplay is to Shakespeare "what luminous vapors are to the traveler", and The Killing Stone has the same, knowing fondness for drop-kicking a pun into the cloudy undergrowth. Think souls and shoes. Every sentence is joyfully over-egged, and not just the lengthy asides on the nature of sin and the spirit; nobody ever, for example, expresses doubts when they could be 'launching this the emblazoned Ship of mine Suspicions o'er Contention's froward abyss' (that's one of mine - the screenshot below should fill in the picture).
I'm calling it Shakespearean but I also think of The Alchemist, Ben Jonson's wonderful play about con artistry, and (predictably) Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. It helps that The Killing Stone has a couple of great voice actors on hand: Critical Role's Liam O'Brien, who plays the one-eyed devil, and Baldur's Gate 3's Emma Gregory, who plays Mariken in spectral conversations that may yet prove to be your own character thinking aloud.
Both actors really sink their teeth into the material, but Gregory is especially listenable as the swaggering, erudite Mariken. She's become my top choice for Wayne June's replacement in Darkest Dungeon 3, assuming that gets made. I haven't spent much time with the "modern prose", which reads to me like a hesitant dilution, unsure of which century it's from and afraid of putting on any daft accents.
The other Svangårds don't have voice actors, and risk feeling like passive victims despite their labyrinthine backstories. I'm enjoying getting to know them through the cards and roguelite mechanics, which reflect their personalities a little. The first Svangård you're asked to defend is a somnambulatory kid, for example; he gives you the ability to sleep-walk creatures with no attack value into the enemy battle line. While tackling his contracts, you'll also get card packs with titles like "Childish Denial".
Zounds, being a goddamn weasel pettifogger is fun! If I knew combing legal contracts for duplicate wording and the like was so eldritch and unsavoury, I absolutely would have taken that law conversion course and sold my soul to the devil after getting that silly English degree in the noughties. I wouldn't be pissing about making peanuts from effing games journalism. Read more on Steam.
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