izigame.me

The core design is similar to a very stripped down version of Monster Train: You have Allies and Constructs which you place on the field — a pair of three-tile long lanes, with an opposing pair of three-tile lanes for your opponent — and Items which you play from your hand to affect those units. As in Monster Train, all of these card types can be upgraded with charms to create new effects and synergies — though these effects are relatively understated.
The inspired part of the design, however, is that where these games have a system where you expend energy each turn to play cards, Wildfrost combines the concept of energy and turns. Each time you play a card one turn passes — and, as each turn goes by, the units on the field tick down towards their next attack. Rather than dumping and redrawing your hand every turn, you instead have to either waste a turn on a redraw or play a certain number of cards to get a free redraw. Thus each battle is a race against time, trying to maximize the effectiveness of each card play and organize your battle lines to absorb or preempt each attack.
This core design is tremendously impressive, capturing much of Monster Train’s explosive possibility space while still retaining much of Slay the Spire’s elegance. When it works it feels great: Each action is of monumental importance, each position of each unit matters, an immaculate and immediate tactical puzzle. However, the perfection of the broad strokes of the design is somewhat let down by some of the specific design decisions.
A lot of runs tend to end due to oversight of or confusion about incoming damage, suddenly losing your best unit to an attack you didn’t see coming. I’m sure many expert players will respond “git gud”, but I don’t think it adds much to the tactical puzzle of the game to force the player to calculate incoming damage from all sources and predict which unit it will be applied to: Some sort of incoming damage preview would be very helpful, not just for preventing unpleasant and confusing surprises but also for teaching the rules of the game. There are some tricky cases here, of course: What do damage previews look like for enemies with the “aimless” trait? Perhaps a range of damage, or perhaps just appending a “?” To the display. Should a preview appear when you’re about to use a skill that would change the outcome, or would that incentivize players to just try to preview everything and brute force solutions? Similarly, when applying a charm to a card, it would be helpful to see a preview of what the finished card will look like — it’s not always obvious how charms will interact with each other or with innate card abilities. Though the specifics are tricky, it’s still the case that a few such simple UI changes could make the game significantly more straightforward to play and easier to pick up.
Some issues are a bit thornier. When the player is asked to select a card, it’s not uncommon to be offered a choice of one of three cards which are simply not useful in the current context. Skipping an item card is not allowed, so every item card encounter has a non-trivial chance of making your deck slightly but significantly worse. Card removal events can be encountered in the world, but since they can often only be visited by sacrificing the chance for a shop or item card they can really only be used to strengthen an already-powerful deck and almost always are used to remove starter cards, leaving any duds found later on in encounters to drag you down. The net effect of all of these choices is that it’s quite common to feel trapped in a bad run, unable to strip away the cards that are bogging your deck down, slowly accumulating more of them as you’re presented with more unappealing choices with no chance to remove them.
A good way to fix a lot of these issues might be to expand the functionality of the shop. Compared to Slay the Spire there are very few cards available for purchase, just one more than in a standard treasure encounter, which makes them barely better than such an encounter for the purposes of finding a card which makes your deck better than worse. Compared to Monster Train, the charms are all randomized and unknown, so spending 50 gold can completely arbitrarily yield something that suddenly makes your deck unstoppable or something that’s a completely useless joke. Expanding the shop with a couple more cards and with a finite and visible selection of charms that can be strategically and intentionally purchased would go a long way, as well as adding some sort of purchasable card removal. It might, perhaps, even be worthwhile to have separate charm and card shops, adding a bit of depth to the decision of which node to visit.
These problems could also be addressed to some degree by simply increasing the number of encounters per stage of the game, though some events might need to be reduced in effectiveness or frequency to counterbalance the additional encounters.
The final major issue I have with the game is that the three current tribes — factions which determine what cards are available to you — do not seem equally well-considered. The Shademancers, centered around summoning and sacrificing units… simply don’t seem to work very well at the moment. The first issue I encountered with this faction is that almost their entire starting deck is taken up with 5 Tar Blade cards, an item which does damage equal to the number of Tar Blades in-hand. This is a pretty boring card to start off with so many of, and not an especially strong one. It is, moreover, one that only gets weaker as the game progresses and your deck grows, one that doesn’t meaningfully interact with any of the tribe’s core mechanics, and one that can’t really be strategized around. Another significant issue is that a number of cards have special triggers on “sacrifice” — that is, something special happens when they’re killed by the player instead of by an enemy. The problem is, it’s not really clear what counts as a sacrifice. Does attacking something covered in spikes and dying as a result count? (No.) Does dying due to losing HP over time count? (No.) Does being destroyed by an allied unit’s active effect count? (Yes.) At each juncture, the player can make educated guesses about what might count as a sacrifice, but there’s really no way to be sure — another place where, perhaps, some form of combat preview would be helpful.
There are other issues. The “Soulbound Skulls” card, which randomly selects one enemy and one player unit to soulbind, making one unit die if the other one dies, is effectively a 1 in 6 chance of instantly losing if it happens to target the leader. The preponderance of units which can only function alongside one another, relying on sacrifices and deaths and triggers which can only happen once you manage to get several of them, makes each individually untakeable and the beginning of the game a hellish slog where the player struggles to find a single viable unit. The flavor of the faction and the core mechanics are cool, the interplay between them can be really fun, but the whole thing doesn’t seem designed in a way that acknowledges it’s in a deckbuilder and that you’re not going to have all these resources available, you’re going to have a few of them if you’re lucky enough to find them.
The core design is incredible, the visual and audio presentation are fantastic, I have had the soundtrack stuck in my head for weeks. I hope all the stuff mentioned here can get ironed out, because I think with a little reworking this game could be one of the all-time greats.