The 2019 Goaties: #8 - Card of Darkness
It is no secret that I am a distinct fan of designer Zach Gage's games. From 2012's post-apocalyptic eating contest Guts of Glory to mobile darlings SpellTower and Typeshift, his approaches to design and twisting convention consistently straddle a line between thought-provoking and haunting.
Enter Card of Darkness, an Apple Arcade launch title that blends a specific brand of solitaire - I don't know which, but it's the kind where you can go up or down the number count, 4-5-6-5-4-3-4, etc - with the impeccable art stylings of Adventure Time's Pendleton Ward, some combat puzzling, very light storytelling, and, uh...roguelite...elements.
“CARD OF DARKNESS
(Apple Arcade)”
...hmm. <checks notes> The Roguelike Affliction claimed solitaire, too.
Okay, that's fine! It's dismissive to just call Card of Darkness a roguelite, even if it borrows some of those core run/loop-based elements, when it is much more level-based in nature. You'll enter a level, which is itself comprised of one or more floors, stuffed full to bursting with a four-by-four or five-by-four grid of cards on cards on cards. The goal: carve a path by clearing stacks of cards from the bottom to a staircase at the top, eventually reaching the end alongside another equippable Card of Darkness. Each standard card falls into one of five archetypes - weapons, potions, coin, scrolls and enemies - and tapping a card will affect you in some way. Weapons are equipped to dispose of enemies that match their even/odd values, potions are guzzled, scrolls and coins fall into your backpack, and enemies deal damage based on their strength.
Card of Darkness' strengths lie in the extreme variety of cards under each of these archetypes. Weapons range from standard daggers and swords to bizarre thorned blades and frostfire swords that harm you with every card you pick up. It's the enemies that take center stage here, displaying an incredible variety of tactics, effects and abilities to contend with. Some have numerical values that fluctuate with each passing turn or are affected by other cards on the field, while others heal you upon pick-up but poison you in the process. On occasion, rare creatures offer laughably potent riches but at severe cost, chunking away at your health or dramatically increasing the power of other foes on the board. From the lowly Rock to the copycatting Mimorust, learning the ins and outs of Card of Darkness' menagerie is a game in itself.
A brief example of how an average level might:
I see a face-up Broadsword with a value of 8 in the first row.
I tap it to equip it, temporarily replacing my unarmed, zero-damage fists. That Broadsword will destroy the Crow in the stack next to it with a value of 6 without breaking, because they’re both even values. The sword also has a higher value, so I don’t take damage.
I could choose to destroy the Rock with a value of 7 that was hiding under the Crow, but that Rock breaks my weapon when I defeat it due to the even/odd mismatch.
Each of these baddies destroyed reveals the next card in that stack, and unless I have a scroll or ability to mitigate, the rest of the stacks I’ve started to clear must be entirely cleared before I can move on.
It can quickly spiral out of control or, through careful planning and execution, allow you to reap tremendous rewards.
Between levels, you'll spend coin on single-use scrolls, tokens that spawn weapons or potions (and upgrades for said tokens), and additional inventory slots for the titular Cards of Darkness, which can profoundly affect the difficulty of a given level. As you start getting familiar with the trials in a dungeon, you can swap out your Cards at the start of a run to, say, allow for more Daggers or potions, or give your basic unarmed attack a little more oomph with each kill (which is, categorically, the most game-breaking card in the game). This does tend to lean towards more people who are repeatedly dying and need that extra edge, but the system itself isn't inherently flawed and lets you subtly shift the cards in your favor.
There's a beautiful simplicity to the flow of Card of Darkness, and even when it gets to be a little grating with unfortunate card draws, it never feels actively destructive: at most, you're losing five to ten minutes of progress in a level. Game time is at a premium these days, but it never felt like I was so disheartened by a loss that I had to take a break. It was merely a shrug, maybe a slightly furrowed brow, with a resolve to give it another stab. The difficulty curve also feels a little skewed towards the midgame, as after a certain point in Card acquisition, you can kinda just steamroll the vast majority of the opposition. Even enemies that scale their strength to always reduce you to 1 HP don't really prove that challenging, instead being more of an interesting roadblock to navigate around or through.
Card of Darkness succeeds in the diversity of experience and its genuinely fun discoveries. When it clicks, it's sincerely engaging and has a strong heart drenched in care and adorable art direction. It's never exhausting, and just about every level offers some new idea or wrinkle to the slowly-growing vocabulary of terms and abilities to contend with. In the grand pantheon of Zach Gage releases, it's one of my favorites, and the rarest of mobile games that I could see myself replaying with a new approach somewhere down the line.
