So, I’ve been watching some gameplay of Obsidian Prince and it’s really unique and interesting. The gameplay looks quite simple at first, but there’s a lot going on.
You have a set of standard abilities you can use thatCost different amounts of energy. These get modified by two different decks of cards, but this isn’t a card game in the traditional sense.
Your character has a deck that represents their backstory. When you enter a room, you pick 3 of these from a selection, which then modify combat in that room. These might give you a bit of health or armor, or they might modify an ability in some way.
The other deck is called inspirations. Three of those are dealt each turn (a turn here is in the traditional roguelike sense, so moving one space would cause three new cards to be drawn). Because of this, it might be more advantageous to use a given ability that turn because of which cars were drawn. For instance, you might draw cleave, which attacks an adjacent event for free if you get a kill with a basic attack that turn.
When you start getting into fights with different types of ranged and melee units, managing your energy and dancing around different attacks gets far more involved than the gave appears at a glance.
If a character gets defeated, they don’t die, but they get a negative card added to their backstory. These are automatically chosen when drawn. On the default difficulty these seem easy to get rid of, but maybe on veteran (the recommended difficulty once you are familiar) it’s more of an issue, which would explain why characters can be retired.
I haven’t even mentioned that there is town building, including different facilities that can Train new characters to be different classes.
The game already looks pretty deep, but is going to be in EA for 1-2 years to add more to it. Hoping to be really interesting to see how it develops.
