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dkirschner's Griftlands (PC)

[April 29, 2025 03:53:58 PM]

This is a roguelite deckbuilder that’s neat in that you have two different decks and there is some interesting worldbuilding, with probably like 100 characters you can meet. It’s also narrative heavy. You play runs with one of three characters, each of whom has their own story. Unfortunately though, it never really clicked with me; I was always sort of bored. I played two runs with the first character, Sal, dying near the end of my first attempt. On my second attempt, I noticed “story difficulty,” set it to that, and steamrolled the second run. I left it on story difficulty and steamrolled the game with the second character, Rook, too. When I started the third character, I was sort of dreading learning his mechanics, the tedium of leveling up another set of cards (you can level up each card once by using it a specific number of times), the endless filler-feeling dialogue, and the tons and tons of negotiations and battles I would have to wade through to get to the end of another story that I didn’t care about. So, I played part of the first day for him to get a sense of the character and any new mechanics, then called it quits.

Here's how the two types of decks/combat work. The first is “battle” and needs no explanation. This is normal deckbuilder stuff. Do lots of damage and kill stuff. Some mechanics include “prepare” (a card is “prepared” when it is in the leftmost spot in your hand and can activate special abilities), “gamble” (one character has a coin that he flips, and some of his cards do different things depending on heads or tails), “burn” (deals damage over time), and so on. Each character has a few unique mechanics.

When you battle enemies, you can spare them or kill them. If you spare them, they might hate you (all the various characters you encounter can either hate, dislike, like, or love you). If you kill them, their friends might hate you. If you kill them in an isolated place, well, you got away with murder. It can be tempting to kill enemies because they drop items, and sometimes quite good ones, or maybe because they were real jerks and deserved it. But, when someone hates you, you get a debuff (e.g., status cards cost one extra action), which does go away if you kill that person later. When someone loves you, you get a buff (e.g., gain 4 defense and 2 power at the beginning of every battle). It’s obviously good to have a lot of people love you and few people hate you. I definitely had some hate debuffs that were pretty annoying to deal with.

The second thing you can do is “negotiation,” and this one is different. It’s the same basic idea as battle, except think of it as the passive option. This second deck is full of cards that are meant to manipulate, persuade, and intimidate others. In a negotiation, you have “arguments.” Characters all have a “core argument.” Then, they can make other arguments that do various things. All arguments have “resolve” (HP). When an argument’s resolve reaches 0, it is defeated. No big deal for a regular argument; these come and go during a negotiation. If your core argument loses its resolve, then you lose the negotiation.

So, there are generally two ways out of a situation: battle or negotiate. Sometimes, negotiations make subsequent battles easier. As you think about building your decks, remember that if you lose a negotiation, you might still be able to battle, but if you lose a battle, you can’t then negotiate…because you’re dead. That means that, for me at least, negotiation was far more useful, and I chose that option far more. On the other hand, there are more mandatory battles than mandatory negotiations, and bosses are typically trying to kill you, not argue with you. So, you can’t rely on only one deck; you must figure out how to balance them.

There are some other things to consider, such as the battle and negotiation grafts (like skills or perks you acquire each run), and then the various roguelite meta upgrades. You can unlock permanent upgrades for each character, perks that can be used on any character, as well as new cards that will appear in your runs.

In the end, it feels strange to say, but I wish I had just stopped after the first run. I feel like I wasted my time with this one hoping that it would click. There are certainly things I enjoyed (like the negotiations and trying to get a ton of characters to love me), but like I said earlier, I just found Griftlands tedious and boring.