Meteorfall: Krumit’s Tale
A bewitching Spirealike with a twist in the... well, you know
PC
Adungeon-crawling, Roguelike deckbuilder, you say? Ah, go on then. Many hundreds of hours into our intense, seemingly inextinguishable love affair with Slay The Spire, the elephant in Meteorfall’s room, the notion of picking up something so ostensibly similar seems a little pointless, like trying to supplement a cocaine habit with caffeine tablets.
Despite appearances, however, this is no mere copycat. Krumit’s Tale is the sequel to Meteorfall: Journeys, a mobile-only Roguelike card game that released early in 2018, weeks after Slay The Spire launched into early access. Journeys was a much simpler game, at least on the surface. You and your opponents each had a deck; you had a mana pool and draw limit each turn, and chose whether to play or reshuffle the topmost card with touchscreen swipes. Krumit’s Tale builds on those foundations significantly – and frequently confoundingly.
Instead of facing a procession of enemies one at a time, dungeons now play out across a 3x3 grid. The enemy pool is shuffled in with your deck, which is dealt into empty tiles created as you kill opponents and acquire weapons, items and abilities. Cards already in play cascade down to fill the gaps, with new arrivals landing in the top row.
It’s a tough thing to get your head around at first, and even the notionally straightforward early game is complicated by the way currency works. You have to pay to add cards to your inventory, using gold won either by defeating enemies or by destroying other cards on the board. A simple sword, which adds a single damage point to your base attack stat, will cost two gold; once you’ve added it to your inventory, you can use it just three times before it’s destroyed, and gone for the rest of the dungeon. Another two-cost ability adds three damage points to your next attack, but exhausts after a single use.
As such, the tough decisions begin immediately. Your meagre base attack does two points of damage; enough to see off the rank and file, but you’ll likely take a few dings along the way, and while Bruno the barbarian (one of the two characters available in early access) gets two health back after every fight, he’ll still need to destroy tiles to stay alive.
The notionally straightforward early game is complicated by the way currency works
You might not need that short sword right now, but what about later in the dungeon, when the one you’ve got equipped now will have been exhausted? Should you use the armour in your inventory to speed up a fight against a grunt and conserve health, or save it for a tougher enemy? If it’s a boss dungeon, wasting powerful abilities on the rank and file is asking for trouble, since you’re likely only a few more cards away from a beast with a
health pool four times the size thunking down onto the board.
You can tip the odds back in your favour a little with end-of-dungeon rewards. You can choose one of three randomly selected cards, and buy more from a store with another currency, gems, that you earn during battle. You’re also offered a choice of perk, which function similarly to Slay The Spire’s relics – though here the balance is tipped more towards trade-offs than straight buffs, with many of the more powerful variants coming at a cost. Scrappy, for instance, increases the health gained from discarding a tile by two points, but reduces your max HP by four.
Despite the apparent similarities, then, this is a very different beast to Slay The Spire, chiefly in how complex it is from the off: Mega Crit’s game is notionally simple to understand, its myriad layers of breadth and depth peeling away the more you play. The rather barebones tutorial could do with being fleshed out as it moves through early access, but we’re more than happy muddling our way through for now. Slay The Spire proved viable the combination of Roguelike and card game; whether Krumit’s Journey marks the next evolution of that concept remains to be seen, but we’re intrigued enough to want to stick around and find out.