Eldritch Soul
I totally did not “get” Eldritch Soul for the first few rounds. It’s a roguelike card game where you are battling an ancient evil, and it wasn’t clear to me at first that you can never win (even though it explains this, specifically). All you can do is hope to survive a little longer than last time. Which, you’d think I’d have played enough Playdate roguelikes at this point to understand that, but alas.
It’s played in rounds. You first get to make your deck from a small assortment of cards, and after each turn, the Eldritch Horror (called “The Hunter” here) will attack you for an increasing amount of damage. You’ll add another card to your deck each turn, making your deck bigger, and the round ends when your deck is empty. You can heal, and an increasable “sanity meter” puts a limit on how many cards you can play each turn, but the goal is always to empty your deck as quickly as possible to survive another round.
The key to the strategy here is how the cards will interact with each other. You’ll continue changing it up as the run progresses, but you’ll always have your first three cards in there. So, maybe you’ll want to focus on discarding cards from your hand, or adding a lot of health before the creature is too powerful, or “burning” (discarding cards directly from the deck) as much as you can. Some cards will have an effect that lasts the whole round and let you draw an extra card, or restore some health. Figuring out at the beginning of the round how to want to play it this time is key – trying to switch up strategies in the middle of a game is a sure way to make your cards all fight against each other instead of with each other.
As you progress, the card effects will get more complicated, almost like when you play a too-long game of real-life card game Fluxx, which starts with very few rules and ends up with very many. Picking new cards that fit your strategy is a big part of doing well, and there are cards that will give you useless “curse” cards that just take up space, too! But maybe your strategy is to get a lot of curse cards, actually? Some cards will, for example, have you discarding some cards in your hand to give you health boosts. The leftmost card in your hand is always the one discarded first, so maybe an annoying curse card is exactly what you need in that case.
The longer you play Eldritch Soul, the more you’ll feel your mind expand as you understand the intricate relationships between one card and another. It’s up there with Spilled Mushrooms on an interconnectedness level, and if you like that one, you’ll find something to love here, too! Finally, there’s a series of Arcana that you can unlock by meeting certain requirements, and they each give you one game-spanning boost, like increased score, or draw an extra card each round, or something like that. Finding cards that emphasize these boosts is a sure road to the top of the online leaderboards! And you’ll unlock some background lore while you go along, too, to give some context to the whole thing.
If you want your brain to be tickled in a strange way, this is a great game for it! Just don’t expect to “win” and you will be surprised at how well you can do with just a deck of cards against an unspeakable evil.
(Released October 24, 2024, on Itch and February 25, 2025, on Catalog. Copy provided by developer.)