Recent reviews by ermengarde

honestly? love this game. it lacks some polish, sure, but makes up for it with overall fantastic art direction and sound design, unpredictable and very cool story, immersive world, and pretty satisfying card battler mechanics (speaking as a person with over 1200 hours in slay the spire).

pros:
- fully voice-acted, which i usually don't care for, but hearing all these old russian words actually spoken makes a huge difference for immersion
- the worldbuilding in general. i feel like i learned so much about pagan russian folklore, and for that alone i deeply appreciate this game. (though i wish we had more lore for some of the cards. why is pryzor sticky, for instance?!)
- love the art direction! shoutout to the card art, not just in the book, but for all the enemies' moves as well. fantastic adaptation of the permian animal style
- speaking of art direction, the cinematography of each cutscene is actually amazing. i'd love to someday see a remastered version of this game with really polished graphics in the cutscenes
- lovely sound design as well as soundtrack. love all the little flourishes and ui sounds with the folk instruments
- good assortment of battle mechanics; i especially like the setup of koldun battles, even if they are the most annoying battles in the game. i suspect most players are split on whether puzzle battles are good or not, but i personally enjoyed them

cons:
- some ambiguous card text and tooltip text making it unclear what some cards or effects actually do
- adding onto that, the computed zagovar damage is not always correct: it doesn't take your current bless stacks into account, nor does it correctly show how much damage an individual enemy in a group of enemies would take. so computing your actual damage every turn is difficult, which is not great for a card battler!
- i suspect that there's only one viable deck strategy, maybe two
- english translation is somewhat rough around the edges (though considering the amount of text in the game, i can understand the difficulty); voice acting sometimes reads different words than what's displayed
- too many different art styles presented initially: when starting the game we go from nice 3D rendered book to nice 2D painted scenes to 3D point-and-click section to dating-sim-like 2D image dialog. a jarring series of transitions
- 3D point-and-click graphics are fairly unpolished and i wish there had been a more natural way of showing the boundaries of each zone, rather than invisible walls for most of those segments
- also, the fixed camera in the point-and-click sections can be disorienting when it moves. this is at its worst in the kickstarter backer graveyards (RIP to all those people btw)
- i think the chorts could have been more punishing when idle. maybe they are on the highest difficulty?
- [SPOILERS] i still don't *quite* understand who cursed the wedding, or what really happened to the beloved; i feel like the narrative didn't fully close the loop on those

stuff i just really liked:
- the folksongs! what a great touch. props to the singers and whoever had the idea to include them. also the encyclopedia and bailichkas in general
- proshka and karnysh! i love a good set of witch's familiars
- also, shoutout to my two favorite one-off npcs: pierre and the "oh, what a life!" susedko

a small, lovely platformer. introduces new mechanics at an effective pace within levels that are simple to read yet offer multiple routes to progression. puzzles are nontrivial, but quite forgiving. animation is smooth and uncluttered. this is not a long game (i am unskilled at platformers, and was able to beat it in an hour), nor a fiendishly challenging platformer, nor does it have an extensive or intricate plot. its ambitions are more modest: to craft a tidy, unique little game. and at that it has succeeded mightily.