Nowhere Prophet
PC
The secret of a good Roguelike, or any run-based game, is that reaching game over – taking a killing blow, losing your final unit or plunging the world into darkness – can actually be a highlight. It’s a chance to reflect on what you did wrong and hash out plans that will surely guarantee victory next time. The tragedy of Nowhere Prophet, a card game essentially locked into ‘ironman’ mode, is that it makes losing no fun at all.
Which is a shame, because there’s a lot to like here. You lead a caravan of survivors across Soma, a postapocalyptic wasteland. Yes, another one – but where Nowhere Prophet differs is that, alongside all the usual Mad Maxisms, it draws inspiration from the Indian subcontinent. The dusty landscapes are splattered with oranges and pinks evoking the coloured powders thrown during the Hindu festival of Holi, and its character designs find an interesting midpoint between Indian history and cyberpunk future.
It’s not short of mechanical ideas, either, even if they’re not all strictly new. Nowhere Prophet grabs concepts from other games with the eagerness of Soma’s scavengers. Like Slay The Spire, this is a singleplayer deckbuilding game where you navigate a map of branching paths, beating bosses to progress to the next screen, with the added complication of resources to manage – primarily food and hope, burned like fuel as you travel across the wasteland. This is the first clue that Nowhere Prophet’s structure is borrowed from an earlier source: FTL. The next is the proliferation of text events, blocks of story with multiple-choice outcomes that trigger whenever you reach a new point on the map, and occasionally while travelling between them. These are at least as common as card battles – you’re likely to encounter in excess of 50 text events in a single playthrough. It doesn’t take long for repetition to set in, and we find ourselves skimming the flavour text, clicking an option without much care for the consequences.
The battles themselves are much more successful, sticking close to the formula laid out by Hearthstone, with an added spatial element that recalls Gwent. You play units in rows and columns – only those closest to the enemy can attack, or be attacked – and use them to either chip away at your opponent’s battle line or go straight for their leader. In practice, you’re almost always best doing the latter.
The card game is quietly asymmetrical. While both sides are playing the same game, their objectives are different because of the context each match is played within. Computer-controlled opponents are trying to reduce your leader to zero health. You’re trying to do the same to them while minimising losses, with an eye to future battles, because your leader’s health is persistent, as is damage to your troops. Any time a card-summoned character gets knocked out of the game, they take a wound. If it happens again, you lose that card forever.
It’s an interesting twist on the standard deckbuilder: use your favourite cards too much and you risk losing them. But in practice, it makes for a strange fit. Battles are too frequent to spend the pre-game fussing over vulnerable units, the way you would in a game like XCOM, and – in spite of the option to rename them – it’s much harder to form a connection with a virtual square of card. Worse, the inclusion of permadeath discourages chasing synergies and honing the exact right balance of cards – the things that make it so compelling to construct your own deck – because you never know when you’ll lose the one card that ties it all together.
So when you’re at the virtual table, attacking other units feels wasteful, because it damages your cards. Go for your opponent directly, though, and you don’t have to suffer any counterattack. The best plan, in almost all cases, is to throw everything you’ve got at the leader, trying to knock them out as quickly as possible so you can escape with minimal losses. There is a mechanical counter to this: Taunt, which – as in Hearthstone – means that unit must be destroyed before attacks can be pointed elsewhere. In our experience, this one keyword ends up defining most of Nowhere Prophet’s battles. Any match where the opponent fails to get a Taunt to the table is over in a few rounds. Only when an enemy Taunt is played do you have to engage in the board state.
Groanworthy stuff, yes, but it does reveal the abundance of ideas buried in Nowhere Prophet’s card game. The multi-lane positioning alone would be enough to make it stand out. The grids can vary in size, giving you a frontline that’s between three and five spaces wide, and are randomly scattered with obstacles. Together, these factors can hugely impact the feel of a battle. A three-by-three grid with rubble blocking one of the lanes can be enough to induce claustrophobia, and encourages you to play with the push and pull mechanics, which recall Into The Breach.
The game’s structure, though, means that these kinds of intricacies are often ignored, in favour of just playing on autopilot. Your eye skims over a text event; your brain seeks the quickest route to end combat, because there are always 50 more piling up behind. Runs take multiple hours to complete, and while there are new decks to be unlocked, they’re accessed by hitting fixed milestones, meaning there’s no consolation prize for any run that fails to surpass your personal best.
Defeat in Nowhere Prophet can be creeping, as your resources drain away, or sudden, as you fall victim to an unexpected combination of cards. Either way, it feels like playing against an opponent who overturns the table when they win, leaving you to gather up the spilled cards. It’ll be another couple of hours before you have a deck that feels unique, before you escape the mire of enemies and text events you’ve seen a dozen times. It’s enough to make you a sore loser.
The best plan, in almost all cases, is to throw everything at the leader, trying to knock them out as quickly as possible