The game’s title art
Inti Creates is a studio I was very affectionate about, back in the day. I’m a very big Mega Man Zero fan, and they’ve had my ear since. They’ve always had a weird cutesy anime style I wasn’t exactly on board with, but their games were always good enough I didn’t mind.
This game is no different; the anime bullshit is still here in full force. But there’s, again, enough to go on that it doesn’t get in the way.
The dungeon crawling side of it
What we have here is a story-driven, run-based dungeon crawler that’s also primarily Slay the Spire but also a bit of Mega Man Battle Network. The grid and spacing based battles along with the whole card and deckbuilding brings both of these together.
The premise is in the near future, all gaming seems to be done through some VR apparatus that makes games more immersive, but they’re still extremely just video games. But also, it goes deep enough that in VR the characters in said games might as well be real. So somehow it becomes an issue when people hack these games and put viruses in them. Or something? I’m not sure. You’re a VR hacker vigilante who gets into company mainframes to help hacked video games. It’s silly.
The battle side of it
The writing is surprisingly alright, and it has to do with the gimmick of the narrative; since it’s about going INTO video game files, there’s a lot of meta conversation about video games. Your detective guy and his helper, a lady from the company he’s hacking, talk about video games franchises a lot. And they’re often tongue-in-cheek references to real franchises.
The cards you get in game are all related to these franchises, of course. A lot are made up for this game, but any and all (not the Mega Man ones though) Inti Creates games can also show up here. So the card collecting aspect is both according to this made up video game world and as a history of Inti Creates titles.
Let’s not even comment on the sheer dumb absurdity of ‘The Gaming Chair Detective’
There’s some original gimmicks to the Slay the Spire card game formula here, enough to keep the actual card based gameplay feeling fresh. The game also seems to have pretty good pacing; it keeps you interested and is pretty engrossing to play. All in all I am very, very impressed with this. I went in expecting some weird anime nonsense, and while I certainly got that, there’s also an excellent game here.
As of writing (2024-11-09), Card-en-Ciel is already fully released and available.