With their upcoming debut title A Long Way Down, Seenapsis Studio reserves roguelike fans and board gamers alike a seat at the table for a nice round of cards.
This is dungeon exploration with turn-based card battles, but here’s the twist: the game board is not fully built yet. Each dungeon floor is only partially there – a starting location, the big boss monster, some treasure chests.
It is up to you which path to build. Do you want to clear out all the treasure and collect some shiny new cards for your deck first? Or do you want to beeline straight towards the boss, avoiding all other fights that might wear you down? I got my hands on an early build at Gamescom and I quite liked how satisfying the game’s board building aspect feels.
The card battles, on the other hand, felt a little too basic, but then, I only got a look at the early game. The idea behind the whole deck-building metagame is that winning battles, finding treasure, and performing small tasks all get you some nice new cards and equipment. Similar to the systems employed in the ingenious Slay The Spire, this allows you to gradually adjust your strategy, and the influx of new cards should keep things interesting.
With its idiosyncratic art style and the solid underlying gameplay mechanisms, there’s already a lot to love about A Long Way Down. If the developers manage to fill the game with interesting cards and encounters and also get the balancing right, this might turn out really well.
Release is still a ways off, but you can already wishlist A Long Way Down on Steam and follow its development on Twitter.
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