With Dungeon Deck, you draft some initial cards and face off against a monster in your first room. You complete, you get a card out of a choice and some currency and you move on. Fairly standard stuff. It’s got some simple pixel graphics that make for a whole aesthetic. It’s a solo dev, so, it makes sense, and it’s not all that bad.
It still grabs me to go for another run though, there are cards to unlock similar to completing runs in Slay the Spire. I’m seeing better cards for things I was doing. Be it centered around knives (which throw the rest of the knives in your hand when you play one), summons (getting cards to buff them or have taunt), or spells (which don’t seem to unlock till later).
There seems to be forced card bloat, with no way to turn down a card reward after a win, but you can sell cards to shops and sacrifice them to altars to make a new card. Deckbuilding around that seems to require guessing at what is going to be the most expensive to sell later, or, rerolling the cards and hoping one is worth taking for your build. In playing more while writing this, I did a complete run and kept bloat down by taking advantage of ways to cut out cards worth less, even if they were part of what I built as, even using an altar to burn 2 cards (instead of three, which would have given me back a card I didn’t want).
Now, much like a chunk of Next Fest demos, Dungeon Deck came out last November, with the demo still up for those to play. This means you can give it a shot, and if you enjoy it, pick it up for 9.99 usd.