2026-4 - Crown Gambit - ★★★★☆

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2447980/Crown_Gambit/

★★★★☆
Playtime: 12 hours

Turns out another way to get me to play a roguelite deckbuilder is by making it not a roguelite or even really a deckbuilder. I'd probably call this closer to a small-numbers tactical RPG or something.

The aesthetics and worldbuilding are the standouts here. It's an anime-adjacent dark fantasy setting where the progenitor god left behind hundreds of magical relics, most of which are monopolized by the royal family whose right to rule is backed by the crown's ability to turn said relics on or off. Only the knightly Paladin Corps are authorized to use and police relics.

The opening premise is immediately intriguing: you play as three novice Paladins recruited to secretly escort the king to a hidden location. Since they've all only just joined the Corps, the idea is that they have yet to form substantial ties with various factions vying for the crown. The squad is:

• Aliza, former noblewoman and the second-ever female Paladin. Her relic is a sword that lets her control blood. Meant to be your DPS.
• Rollo, a common sailor who protected the Princess by slaying a monster with his ship's anchor. His relic is said chain-and-anchor that he whips around. Meant to be your Tank.
• Hael, a monk who lived in seclusion at an abbey until he was sent to join the Corps as a political move. His relic is a classic glowy morning star, since he's meant to be your Cleric.

Of course, the king dies, as they always do, and the novices must scramble to figure out whom to support in the impending succession crisis whilst hounded by mysterious assassins and the rest of the Paladin Corps both. It's a fun way to allow a cavalcade of weird knights and their weird magic weapons to show up.

So you basically get visual novel segments of narrative split by moving from zone to zone (comically using a Slay the Spire style map even though there's usually only one path forward) and punctuated with grid-based tactical battles. Your health and armor are persistent until a chapter ends, so the intention is that you'll have to make some tough choices about when to really push the team.

This ties into what seems like one of the main aspects of the game that I unfortunately ended up completely ignoring. While each card has a normal function, you can also elect to remove it from that battle's deck for a much more powerful "Ancestral Grace" version. But this causes the character's Ancestral Affinity to increase, which has various knock-on effects. Some abilities become more powerful as Affinity rises, which, hey, great! But using them too often starts to permanently shrink the gauge, giving you fewer and fewer opportunities.

There are also narrative consequences. Your characters become more impulsive and irrational as their Affinity gauge rises. This means that when presented with a choice, it's possible someone in your party will freak out and override your decision with what they want... and probably the most violent version of what they want. This happened to me a grand total of one (1) time, which was the tutorial explaining it in the first place.

So, basically, you can spec Hael such so that he starts every battle with a self-buff that gives him a charge of "Benediction", allowing you one free use of Ancestral Grace without the gauge going up. The boosted version of another one of his cards gives all three party members a charge of Benediction. By around halfway in I was opening almost every battle with a full-party alpha strike of boosted abilities, which wrecks the difficulty curve. I probably should have played at a higher difficulty,

Despite cruising through most battles in the back half, you get into so many that I just found it exhausting. The party moves from one noble district to another to learn about each major faction and how they have their own allegiances and complex motives that tie into each other. There's a codex to keep track of most of it, but the English localization (I believe the game was originally written in French) gets a bit shaky at times with inconsistent spellings or terminology. At a certain point I stopped thinking much about the ideologies of any given faction and just focused on the "I wonder what Stand this weird-lookin' knight's got" factor, which is still fun in its own way.

I think I would have really loved the proverbial version of this game that's a 30-hour CRPG where I could get more downtime to become invested and immersed in the worldbuilding, or a streamlined 4-hour version that'd make exploring the consequences of different options more viable. Instead I must settle for a game that is merely pretty solid.