Trials Of Fire
PC
To add to the list of things sorely missed in recent months: the weight of a few plastic battalions or metropolises in the palm, knees huddled under a too-small table, and the expectant unfolding of cardboard. Trials Of Fire might lack the physical substance of these experiences, but it works hard to make you forget that fact. Its adventures play out within a book, each new hex-indented arena springing up from the page, its scenery practically brushing the inside of the screen. The heroes and villains of its tales are represented by flat metallic discs that, at the beginning of each encounter, tumble to the battlefield with a weighty thud.
These are nice touches in their own right, but they speak to a larger design. The game comprises three interlocking systems, each sure to evoke a memory of some distant tabletop. At its heart, the turn-based miniatures game of combat. You’re responsible for a trio of characters, their every action dictated by a corresponding hand of cards. There are cards to move, cards to attack, cards to make pacts with demons or infect a small area of the board with enchanted fumes that choke enemy troops while protecting your own.
Between these encounters you return to an overworld map, your heroes transformed into paper-doll figures as they chart a course across the glasslands of Ashe, the game’s post-apocalyptic fantasy setting. A quest marker constantly guides you to the next essential encounter, but you’re encouraged to meander, nosing at ruins and caves to trigger randomised events: a traveller begging for aid, a strange structure, an obvious trap.
These have no doubt been inherited, like the rest of the game’s Roguelike structure, from Slay The Spire and FTL before it; as in those games, your answer can result in a windfall of loot or a disadvantage you’ll carry with you through the rest of your run. But there’s something in the events’ secondperson prose – “You feel a rumble underfoot; do you run or do you stand your ground?” – that recalls youthful journeys back and forth through Fighting Fantasy books, or the voice of a dungeon master challenging their players with prewritten scenarios.
The latter informs the shape of Trials Of Fire nearly as much as its Roguelike forebears. Runs are presented as shortform campaigns, their fetch quests and boss battles providing just enough narrative thrust for two or three hours of adventuring. (If you’d prefer, there’s a straight combat option that offers back-to-back battles without any pretence of story.) Over the course of each module, your heroes level up and arm themselves with increasingly powerful loot; at its end, everything resets.
Along the way, you tweak each character’s selection of cards, boosting their effectiveness or slipping them out of your pile in favour of something new. Again, comparisons to Slay The Spire are inevitable, but the differences are unmistakable – you’re managing three separate decks. Their makeup is more fluid, too. Each character comes with a core deck of nine and a corresponding card pool defined by their class (covering the usual fantasy archetypes, wizards and warriors, rangers and rogues) but all this can be augmented by slotting in equipment – a sword that adds a couple of close-combat cards, say, or a helmet that introduces a guarded retreat manoeuvre and boosts an underlying defence stat. Vitally, these items are not locked to a single character. The inventory slots available will be defined by class – a warrior might have room for a shield where a wizard can take a spellbook – but most items you collect will be compatible with two or more of your party.
You might try out a card with one character, then, and between battles slide it into the inventory of another – a choice inevitably complicated by the arrival of something new and shiny. It ensures a steady flow of decisions which feeds from one system to the other, as you come up with an idea, test its soundness in battle, then introduce a fresh variable. It’s enough to constantly lock you in for one more turn, one more run – but there’s rarely any sense of being on the hamster wheel, because individual choices remain engaging, especially in combat.
You’re responsible for a trio of characters, their every action dictated by a corresponding hand of cards
The turn-based game has the feel of a third or fourth edition, where various rulesets have been allowed to accrete over time. There are positive and negative effects that can be stacked up on a unit; abilities that let you steal cards from the top of rival decks; and free bonus attacks if you manage to surround a unit. All your cards are powered by a shared mana pool, which can be paid into by discarding from any of your characters’ hands, letting a useless draw feed an ally instead of going to waste. Then again, you could always mulligan – each hero gets a number of redraws per battle, decided by their level and equipment. Or you could recycle those cards to move two spaces or to boost their owners’ defence at the end of a turn, or hold on to one for next turn. You’re never short of options, but the possibility space is so wide open that we occasionally get vertigo. (The presence of an undo button is very welcome, enabling us to play on instinct then revise mistakes after the fact.)
It’s certainly not as drum-tight as Slay The Spire, but that game is, ultimately, just a very well-designed pack of cards. After nearly two years in Early Access, Trials Of Fire is a deep box of components to sift through, with multiple false bottoms and secret compartments to discover: cards, characters and campaign modules that unlock as you go. If this were a physical game, we’re not sure we’d actually be able to lift it off the shelf, so vast are its contents. But really, they’re just an excuse to keep coming back to toy with new combinations and ideas. Even as playing boardgames in person becomes a reality once more, we suspect that Trials Of Fire’s baggy charms will ensure it keeps us from the table on a fair few evenings to come. Just one more turn.