Fate Hunters is a game very, very similar to Slay the Spire. A bit easier though, so long as the ‘Reinforcement’ option is turned off (which it probably should be on your first few attempts), thanks to the introduction of disposable ‘one use’ cards you can pick up without fear of ending up with an oversized late game deck.
The Inquisitor focuses on healing & self-damage with a subfocus on discard. The deck I eventually beat the final boss with was a treasure-heavy Pot of Greed/Empress deck that focused on the combo of Seal of Repentance -> Holy Fire -> Nemesis. The Arcanist specializes in multiple-choice effects, random damage, and duplication, with a subfocus on weaponry. I ended up beating the tower with a Fireball-heavy Wheel of Fortune build with Magic Rune and Fire Rain.
Unlike those first two characters, the Raider is somewhat more limited in build choices and you’re pretty much forced to focus on a Soul Stone-centric build… though that’s far from a bad thing since Soulstones are quite versatile. The winning deck here ended up being centered around Dark Flame, Famine, Souls Bust, and Soulstorm. The fourth and final unique character is the Berserker, which specializes in Wound creation (far trickier to handle than Soul Stones) & criticals with a subfocus in discard. This time I ended up clearing the tower with a weaponry-centric Hermit build; Feel No Pain and Deadly Swing have no downsides when only a single Wound can be in your deck at a time.
The final character, the Spy, is a medley of the others. You can build a deck mimicking one of the above builds, or mix and match from multiple builds. The later is quite risky though and can easily result in a deck that does nothing particularly well. The winning combination I ended with was a Curse-heavy self-damaging Possession build (Cursed Sword, Philosopher’s Stone, Eviscerate, Unbreakable, Nemesis) which transformed into a Hermit deck on the last floor.
So yeah, the game’s fun. I don’t think it’ll have as much repay value as the aforementioned StS though due to the reduced complexity. Of course, that’s to be expected since the entire installation is <300MB. Pick it up on sale sometime for ~$10 if you enjoy StS.
Switching gears now we come to Kingdom Come: Deliverance, which at first glance appears to be an open-world RPG. While that should be right up my ally, in reality the game bears an unfortunately strong resemblance to a medieval life simulator. A hunger system, an energy/tiredness system, a cleanliness system, a food decay system, an equipment deterioration system, an overly complex real-time locational-targeting-centered melee combat system, and a highly limited ability to save your progress.
I got to the second area and just kind of lost all will to proceed, since I most certainly don’t play games to be forced into doing things I already have to do in real life. The visual quality is quite impressive though. If you want to give it a shot, make sure to grab the KCDTweak utility to reduce/eliminate some of the inherent annoyance.
