Demon's Mirror Review (Father Azerun)
TL;DR This is an enjoyable enough deckbuilder with a twist of chaining items on a board for resources, but with a direct competitor like Across the Obelisk out there, the slower pace of runs, the less innovative map design, lack of character progression, and anemic storylines, you will get the most enjoyment if you prefer the revealed mechanics of new cards and items that happen after multiple runs in the game.
Longer version: This is a deckbuilder that clearly has been built on the legacy of games like Slay the Spire, but whose immediate visual and mechanical precursor is the very deep and expansive Across the Obelisk. You have a number of action points per round that can be spent on playing cards (the games main twist) to collect resources from a board in a "link in a chain all the same type of resource." As many people have stated before in reviews, this is not the same as match-3 mechanics, so while the grid may make you think it will play like the match-3 combat mechanics of older games like Puzzlequest, this is a different beast altogether.
The match board's resources are your primary way of getting large resources; while attack cards in your hand might do some damage, a long chain of crossed swords will usually do more. A shield card in your hand might only give you 3 or 4 damage mitigation for that round, whereas a long chain of shields might give you 7-14. The two other resources (green energy and diamonds) work to enhance or fire off effects. the problem is that when you generally start with 3 action points a round and collecting one chain of resource son the board usually costs 2 (though there are various mechanics of mitigation of that cost) the game feels like it is creating an exhausting opportunity cost to try and look to chaining resources (the game's more unique mechanic). This is particularly true of the green energy resource, whose presence can enhance some cards (if you have x amount of green banked, some cards might add near double their normal effect value, for example) or be spent as a required resource costs for some cards that require both green and an action point cost. Why is that a problem? The green resource decays by half every turn, making it feel a bit punishing to collect.
There are three different characters you can play that each have their own card pools: A bruiser with basic mechanics; an enchanter whose unique twist is the "influence" mechanic, that permanently reduces health bars, cannot be removed or healed by monsters, and bypasses shields; and an archer whose "shock" mechanic is a damaging debuff that starts at a counter number (say 3) and then every time you gather resources from the board, it fires off once damaging the creature for the amount of chock they have and reduces the shock counter on them by one. Each hero has a different mechanic in their cards to manipulate the board in some manner with cards that usually cost no action points.
The mechanics shine best in some of the combat designs, particularly a few bosses. One standout boss is a two faced creature that alternately shields it's front or back -- when you chain damage from the resource board it hits the "back", when you do damage from a card it hits the "front." As soon as you hit the creature it swaps it's shield orientation, making the order of operations in your attacks more thoughtful.
However, the game suffers in a number of ways compared to it's Across the Obelisk competitor.
1. The storyline is barely extant and unlocking the conditions to defeat the "hidden final boss" ends up feeling a bit anticlimatic after you do it. The very cool monster designs just don't really hint at any greater worldbuilding and while visually cohesive, it really feels generic.
2. the "branching map nodes" that are common in games like this (Slay the Spire (StS), Across the Obelisk(AtO)) are here as well, but implemented in a manner that feels pretty basic and not very interesting. Unlike AtO, interetsing questline events are completely random, so when you get a random event, ti doesn't usually drive you to seek out specific other pathways to complete the quest. (There is a small exception with an event like the dragon egg, but mostly they are just random and don't lead to significant changes in your path choices.) Most routes have only a few branching choices and some of the paths are a bit nonsensical (for example, you might enter a shop tile and buy stuff with your gold. The next node is a random event with no branching pathway, The next is another shop -- and since most random events don't gain you gold, it's kind of silly not to at least put a choice of a combat encounter spaced between them.)
3. Deckbuilders have three important basic mechanics at their heart: acquiring new cards, upgrading cards in your hand, and pruning cards from your deck. Demon's mirror after multiple runs does have some interesting card variety for each hero, allowing them to be built a few different ways, and each combat gives you a choice of three possible cards to acquire. Upgrading a card is uncommon but feels fair enough, but PRUNING cards is super rare and is paced pretty poorly.
4. While there is a set of buffs and debuffs you can choose as you make successful runs in the game to increase challenge (think the mirror in Hades, and again you see this is AtO) there is zero character progression (more StS than AtO or Hades) so that completing runs does not give you nee options to buffs, starting cards, or other unlocks that might increase the game's longevity.
Again, it is a good game and I have put over 60 hours into it, so I have enjoyed it. I just wish the devs would tweak it a bit more. Imagine if after each run you got a temporary boon for the next run without increasing the difficulty, and each run whenever you successfully finished all three worlds gave a minor permanent buff / skill and finishing off the final boss gave a great permanent buff. This could be anything from thinsg liek giving a chance to purge a card after every x number of combats or after every miniboss and boss (increasing risk/ reward mechanics.) Maybe you might get a buff that makes the first card upgrade at shops free. maybe you could have revealed the name of some of the random events on the map which might help you more strategically plan out your route. Maybe you could start with a specific card in your deck, certain cards being upgraded, reduce the decay of green sources each round, diminish the number of diamonds you need to collect before firing off your special power -- there are lots of interesting possibilities here that would play to the mechanics-focused game here, because there just isn't any story reward worth mentioning.
This is a polished, enjoyable game that only suffers from some stiff direct competition with AtO. The mechanics make for longer runs so it also doesn't quite feel as snappy as some competitor roguelike / roguelite deckbuilders, the story is thin and there could really be more / better incentives for repeated runs. But it is slick, polished, focused on mechanics first and worth your time if you are willing to get past the initial very constraining opening few runs.
Oh, and fuck the smoke monster miniboss that punishes you for using skill cards (which make up about half of your cards, including all cards that manipulate thr board and cards that shield you). That fight is worse than most of the bosses and really could use rebalancing.