It’s totally linear. You occasionally have to decide between two paths but one of them is basically always going to dead-end at a treasure chest.
I had put this game on the back burner and recently came back to it. After some time to cool off on the initial excitement, I’m very lukewarm on it. Even the deckbuilding which left a strong first impression on me is kind of bland. They give you a ton of different options to craft your deck, but it feels so constrained by the shallow combat mechanics. I just don’t have any reason to put all of these damage/elemental mitigation cards in my deck because the battles are rarely dangerous enough where I need them. Even if I did put in a card that gave my character to resistance to frost damage for 3 turns, I have no way to make sure that the enemies who are casting frost spells are going to target that guy instead of some other character in my party. And even if I could, maybe I’m not even going to be in combat with enemies who have frost damage. It all comes down to the cards that can deal the most damage and then hope I get lucky that I have elemental types that the enemies are not resistant to.
Many times already I’ve stumbled into an inescapable boss battle where I have a character with a deck full of spell types that the enemy is resistant to. Even though I have a useless character in my party, I still can generally win these fights. It just ends up taking forever because my damage output is totally gimped. It feels bad wandering into these boss fights and bringing the wrong weapons, but somehow it feels even worse to win them under those conditions. Makes me feel like none of these decisions matter.