Shards of Order

Really great game, a nice little blend of Disco Elysium, Slay the Spire, and Darkest Dungeon. If you are looking for a fun deckbuilder to burn 8 or so hours of playtime on, I cannot recommend this game enough. I'll list a few of it's best strengths below: * Unique and interesting art style and direction * Great strategic deckbuilding and combomaking combat * Really interesting story with some fun eldritch concepts I haven't seen before That being said, the game did have a few points of frustration I want to discuss below (with some minor spoiler aspects, so be warned): 1: **Too Short** By far my biggest complaint is that the game is too short to really enjoy it's unique and interesting lore and gameplay mechanics. I was very interested from both the demo and the full release about the concept of my card selections for my deck playing a role in my available options for dialogue encounters. This added a layer of depth where I was not only selecting cards based on their effectiveness in combat, but also of their potential usefulness in interaction. Unfortunately, this concept was pretty much abandoned save for about two instances where not having the right card only led to a slightly lesser reward. I would have really enjoyed if having certain card selections allowed for access to shortcuts, enemy debilitation, or meaningful bonus loot. In addition to the lack of interesting card-driven dialogue options, the shortness of the game also inhibits the experience of the game's story. There are a lot of interesting story and character concepts at play within the game, but it's too short to allow them to be effective. I can't get too into this without divulging some major spoilers, so I wont, but I truly wish that these concepts were given the space to flourish like they deserved. Lastly on this shortness point, the game is literally too short to see all of the enhancements available in the skill tree, which was a major bummer. When I did my playthrough, I did every combat encounter available to me, and killed all optional bosses (with the exception of one that I accidentally got locked out of, which I will complain about later) but still did not get enough XP to reach the highest tiers of the skill tree for each character. There are no "grinding areas" present in the game either, so that also does not resolve this issue. 2: Early Release Clunkiness The game only came out a few days ago, so these topics I'm willing to give grace on, but I still want to bring them up since they did impact my playthrough experience. For the sake of brevity I'm going to boil it down to a bulleted list: * Clunky skill tree respec process. The game allows you to freely respec your skill trees at will, which is nice, but if you invest heavily in lower tier abilities, you cannot respec them until removing all point investments above them, which makes for a more frustrating respec process. * This may be my own gameplay bias, but a lot of the items for the the scholar seem very, very suboptimal compared his first armor item and his starter staff. It seems they might need rebalancing. This is also somewhat true of the Exile's equipment * Lack of acknowledgement of in-game overachievement/combat pushing. This is real nitpicky, but there was a combat encounter where an enemy was described as 'cowardly' and would run away if any of it's minions were killed. Because I did not want to encounter it again, I killed it prior to any of it's minions. However, the enemy appeared again in a future combat as if it had escaped anyway. * Unwarned content lockout. I wanted to defeat every optional boss in the game prior to fighting the final boss, but found myself struggling somewhat with Javan. I elected to move on to the cathedral to see if there was more exp to be gained before the final encounter so I could circle back to him with some better cards at my disposal. Unfortunately, when I got my warning for the final boss encounter, I said no and turned around to return to Javan. However, I was not allowed to leave the boss chamber to do so. When I tried to reopen my save after defeating the final boss, I was still not able to leave and confront Javan again. There is also no save system for me to load back to, so I would have to restart the whole game in order to fight him again. * Slow movement. Many quests in the game require you to double back to already explored areas in the game, and the click based movement with you just waiting around for your character to run over felt kinda dull. I wish I was able to open my deck and skill tree to look at while waiting for my character to commute. * Dialogue errors. There were a few points where dialogue oddly looped back on itself, and had typos. Nothing severe or gamebreaking, just mildly jarring.