🎴 🧟 Cards of the Dead | Xbox Series X | Review | 7.5/10 | "A Halloween Title Shambles into the Fold" 🧟🎴 @BoomfireGames #IndieGames #GameDev

Just in time for Halloween, Cards of the Dead bursts from the deck to eat our brains. A fun, well-presented and accessible title that only really falls short when it comes to the balancing act.

As the title suggests, Cards of the Dead is a deck builder, there are three narrative paths that are unlocked upon completing each protagonist’s questline and each randomised run will see you trying to survive and hopefully escape this zombie nightmare, as well as finding out the reason behind it through the medium of scattered documents.

I want to begin the review by talking about the presentation, it really comes across with some seriously Amiga-like vibes, from the style of atmospheric audio through to the simplistic gameplay and even the visuals, down to the colour palette chosen. If you grew up with an Amiga, there’s an extra frisson of joy to be taken from how this has the feel of a title that could have been released on Commodore’s much-loved beast.

In terms of gameplay, you’ll be making your way through the stages – most of which have horror-themed pun names, good – by flipping over cards and dealing with whatever hand fate has dealt you. A single-player experience, the main screen shows your character’s visage, how much vaccine is in your bloodstream - to keep the zombie-ness away - as well as your health and what items you have on your person.

The gameplay is very easy to pick up and dive into. You’ll need to find syringes of antidote, as each ‘turn’ depletes your supply and will eventually see you turn into one of the undead, if untreated – this then lowers your actual health until you are ‘granary bread’. 

The tightness of the inventory space means that you’ll also have to make tough decisions on what food and items you leave behind to waste in lieu of a saucy gun or hammer to take down those pesky zombies. There are some great moment-to-moment scenarios in the playthroughs such as car alarms going off and flipping over nearby zombie cards to smash into your health or using up a load of your best weaponry on that final card you just had to flip over before exiting the stage, in case it was some much-needed antidote…nope, it’s a fat zombie with exploding guts, so there.

The main issue I had with the game was in the balancing. At certain points, the difficulty shoots through the roof and, due to the semi-randomised nature of things, it’s possible to reach certain bosses or scenarios and just be incapable of passing them, meaning an inevitable death, even if you’ve had a perfect run with what was available to you up until that point. 

The auto-saving in certain sections also restarts you with whatever you had to hand at the time, meaning that you may as well start from the beginning if you had low health and no weapons unless you have an extremely lucky run ahead of you. In a way, it’s that random shuffle of the deck that acts as both a tense and rewarding gift or an irritating curse.

There are some neat touches in the visuals, such as the heart icon constantly pumping, your character portrait getting more and more zombified as the vaccine level drops and weapons and zombie cards deteriorating when initiated, it all adds up to making the game feel far less static and more immersive, and as I’ve already said, the atmosphere and mechanical setup is great to dive into. 

I’ve come across examples where people have smashed through the whole game in three hours or so, but I can only assume that they happened to have extremely lucky runs as I’ve personally hit walls and struggled through sections with no hope at all of finishing in a straight run!