SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech

Steamworld Quest is a card-based RPG game. Even though it is using the Steamworld robots, the theme seems forced since it is really set in a fantasy world, and the robots don’t tie into the theme whatsoever aside from a few puns like Gilgamech and Necronomicog.

You begin the game with 2 characters but soon gain a third. There’s a couple of other characters that join later, but you can only have 3 in a battle. Each active character contributes a deck of 8 cards which are shuffled together. Without any cards to modify the rules, you play 3 cards per turn from a hand of 6, and can discard 2 cards per turn. When your deck is depleted, it is reshuffled and you carry on as normal.

If you play 3 cards by the same party member, you gain a bonus move which is determined by their “weapon”. Some cards have a bonus move if they are played after a specified character card. Enemies usually play 1 or 2 cards.

There’s many basic cards that can be played for “free” and these generate Steam Power. This is used to play the Skill cards that have a cost. Really, you need 4 basic cards in each person’s deck in order to have a good balance of cards that you can play.

Defeated party members are a serious problem because it restricts what cards you can play. You must discard their cards and hope you draw cards for your other characters, but sometimes your hand will still contain unusable cards. So it affects you more than a standard RPG would. Although all characters have some kind of card that can heal, Galleo mainly focuses in healing and status buffs, so he is often an important team member to have. You can use Recovery items in battle but this counts as a played card.

Status effects often have a massive impact. There’s modifiers like raising/lowering defence/magic resistance/physical/magic attack, and statuses like poison, confusion, paralyzed, blind, bleed, and many others. Some of these have many levels, so defence can be increased many times. There’s no limit to how many statuses are active at once.

You can find new cards in chests, gain some via story events, or buy them at the shop. At a certain point in the game, you can start upgrading your cards.

Sometimes you have to learn what enemies are in the area then switch your cards accordingly. There were many bosses where I failed/quit early, switched my cards and tried again. Annoyingly, there’s no option to save deck/team configurations. In some ways, it’s not a huge problem because I found my deck was evolving/improving rather than requiring radical changes. Even when I did make drastic changes for a boss, sometimes I just switched out a few defensive cards for attacking ones for the next section since you generally want to play more cautiously against the bosses.

You can equip 2 accessories which can give you resistances to certain statuses, give you extra health, elemental resistances and more.

I felt the UI was a bit clunky and unclear. I expected to be able to hover over status icons to see what they represented, but I had to go into another menu to find them. You need to remember the keyboard shortcuts because the UI doesn’t make it clear either.

You can replay areas to grind or find treasure that you missed the first time around. There’s one or more statues in the level that acts as a checkpoint, respawns enemies and heals you. You can take advantage of this to grind out some experience too. I didn’t use that feature often though.

You can slash some destructible objects for coins. You can sneak up on enemies to deal a small amount of damage and start the battle.

The game was at a good length, taking me around 22 hours. The story/dialogue/environments weren’t very interesting but I don’t think that matters too much. In this type of game, you need a good battle system, and this was great and kept me hooked.

I have not played any games in the Steamworld franchise since Dig back in 2014, so I have no idea where they took things since. Of course this being an RPG caught my interest, generally my favorite types of games.

I'd like to give it the game a higher score, but it would require to ignore too many flaws. The game doesn't have good art. The characters are unpleasant to look, and that might be what the universe is about, but it's oh so not interesting. The story is kinda lame, this is made for all audiences with that cute-sy Nintendo approach with light humor that isn't very funny... it's pretty hard to get invested into these characters because they are so boring. The game has a very linear approach with pretty much just one direction to go all the time, aside from a few different paths for additional loot (you can always backtrack to get them).

The good thing about the game (and the most important thing) is the gameplay. The game is heavily inspired by Slay the Spire with the card battles and your deck always refilling. There is some good strategy in the deckbuilding part, there are numerous cards and you can only have 8 per character (for a total of 24, as your party maxes at 3). The battles are turn based and require a lot of thinking, you'll want to be hitting your combos and re-rolling the right card is a skill that you'll develop as you move further in the game. It's a little grindy as the enemies have so much health, so you really have to plan long term in your strategy to survive and do lots of damage. In total there are 5 heroes, but I stuck with the first 3 all the way to the end as they fit pretty well my gameplay strategy. It took me a little over 15 hours to complete the game, but I have to say that the 2nd portion of the game isn't all that interesting with mostly just a repeat of what you'd had already seen... it lacked originality and was just going through the motions for many more hours.

All in all Steamworld Quest is not a bad game, but I do feel there are many elements where it could have improved, like the limited equipment is not really exciting as you just buy the new gear at the store after a few chapters with very few key decisions in that aspect. At some point you've figured your deck and strategy, so then it's doing 10+ chapters with the same cards that you keep upgrading... It seems it could have benefited from more variation. It takes a lot from Slay the Spire, and to be honest, I would rather play Slay the Spire than this overlong non-roguelite version of it. I wouldn't recommend or discourage anyone from playing it, it's kinda just there and it's ok fun for a while.

Another solid game in this ever mutating franchise. This one has very little in common with the previous in terms of gameplay, though it keeps the same comedic writing and robot characters.

Storywise it is pretty simple, a group of friends embarking on a quest to slay the evil dude. Its cliched, and it attempts some fun at that, but in the end i felt that it came off uninspiring. The writing is also noticeably weaker than on past titles, trying to hard to be funny and more often than not, coming off as annoying.

Visually and sound design is just ok, its a great looking game but its funcional at what its trying to do, and the cartoony visuals are tonally congruent with the writing.

Gameplaywise is where things get more interesting, as the game attempts to marry the final fantsy style of turn based battles, with deck bulding and RNG of something like Slay the Spire. The results are pretty great, with a lot of ability of customize your party through different team members, equipment and deck, and there is even the possibility of upgrading cards with materials received through fights. Its really enjoyable to find how different team members best interact, discovering the nuances of deck building and the energy system in game.
Its a shame that the game is so short, and the enemies quite rudimentary, to really test out the limits of this battle system. It really feels like it is polished for something more that was on offer here. Perhaps there is a sequel or expansions in the work.

Overal a solid experience, with a very novel and enjoyable combat system. I hope there is a sequel in the works to expand the great foundation that was developed here.