I think the first time I played a deck building video game was when Wizards of the Coast put out their Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Plainswalkers games. Friends and I would stay up late into the night building new decks to try out against each other, it was a blast! Later, a friend would recommend Slay the Spire and I saw how incredible a cross between a deck builder and a roguelike could be. What a novel concept! A concept that will be iterated on several times and eventually get watered down. Often, this results in a lot of games attempting to capture something they had no chance of capturing in the first place. Gordian Quest is another attempt to capture lightning in a bottle.
Gordian Quest
Developer: Mixed Realms
Price: $20
Platforms: Nintendo Switch(reviewed) and PC
MonsterVine was provided with a Nintendo Switch code for review
Gordian Quest has two modes, Campaign Mode and Realm Mode. Campaign mode is as you’d expect, a single-player story split into four-acts with a more persistent mode of play. Realm Mode is more what you’d expect of a roguelike, picking three heroes (or one for a renown bonus) to take with you on a branching-path adventure that should only take a couple of hours. As my first foray into Gordian Quest I picked campaign mode. I’m a bit of a narrative, story, and characters guy so I was excited to see a game style I already vibed with mix in with something else I greatly admire. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. Not only is this campaign a mess, it’s extremely boring.
There are ten characters to choose from. Each character has their own playstyles, each with four different starting decks, and a fairly large and open-ended skill tree. Decks are as you’d expect, attacks, defends, specialty cards, etc… My initial team started out with the Druid, Golemancer, and Cleric. As the game started out I thought my team had pretty solid synergy. My cleric had offensive spells that would lead to heals, my druid was extremely agile and offensive, and my golemancer allowed for control over the battlefield. The nice thing about the golemancer is that she’s technically two characters as her golem gets his own turn. I went through my first few battles of bandits and undead before it hit me. Why am I doing this?
Frankly, I have no idea. On character select you’re given a sentence-long backstory on who the character is but when it comes to what’s happening and why the character is there, you’re left in the dark. There are undead attacking a large village and apparently the local constabulary need help fighting a necromancer lord? So you fight and defeat the Rift Lord and he swears revenge but goes away and you get a little “Hey, you did it! But other troubles await further in!” I backed out and went to look at the game modes again. Campaign Mode – 15 – 30 hours. Fifteen to thirty hours?! I checked the ‘run statistics’ which is offered at the end of each act(which is a cool feature, thank you for this). 8 hours. The story of the Gordian Knot is one of decisiveness and choosing the quickest path to victory. Nothing in Gordian Quest feels decisive or quick.
For the most part, your party will be traveling across nodes on a static map. The nodes can be empty, have an encounter, events, shrines, exploration nodes, the nodes don’t lack for variety yet most of them are supremely inconsequential. Encounters are just battles, but events have little stories attached to them along with a decision to make. Sometimes it’ll result in you having to roll a 20-sided die with a skill check to make. If you want to add to your modifier, you can sacrifice a card to make the roll a little easier, bringing in my least favorite mechanic in Gordian Quest. Exhaustion.
If your character becomes exhausted over the course of adventuring or you expend a card for an aforementioned roll, the card in battle is replaced with an exhaust card and you no longer get that card until the character rests. You can rest at an inn so long as you have access to one. Otherwise, as long as you have 10 supplies, something you pick up on your adventures or can purchase at a shop, you can set up camp. Camp allows you to draw cards for camp activities, but you’ll mostly be using it for healing and rest. Spend two turns or so pitching a tent and then four for resting, just to clear your exhausted cards.
Exploration nodes are another bewildering experience. You’re given a number of flags to place on a map that has points of interest and the flags can only travel so far from the previous flag. I’d call it a puzzle but sometimes it’s unsolvable, the points of interest are simply too far away to hit all in a given node. Sometimes the points of interest hurt your party, sometimes it’s a shop, other times it’s just gold or treasure. For the most part, it’s just another lackluster gameplay element that serves no real purpose other than to give the player a little gold and equipment bump.
Equipment is handled in a somewhat interesting way at least. Some pieces of gear merely give you a stat boost or improve your bonus modifier for skill checks in event nodes. However, other pieces will give you access to new cards that can really help out during encounters. Unfortunately, not all of them are very useful. One new piece of equipment offered me a chance to deal an amount of fire damage to all enemies based on how much burn I had used, in my party that had no characters with the burn ability.
All of that and I haven’t even brought up the art, music, or technical issues I ran into on the Switch. Artistically, Gordian Quest resembles a flash game with static, barely animated characters moving around a flat surface while epic war music plays in the background. The illusion is set, but I’m just not buying it. Eventually, you’ll end up losing your cursor. Usually this happens if you put your Switch into rest mode and come back later, one of the primary uses of my Switch. On return there’d be a long wait for the game to catch up that it had been in rest mode, followed by a period of me slapping random buttons to try and regain control of the cursor. This wasn’t the only time I lost the cursor though, and likewise, sometimes there are menus that just aren’t setup for controller usage. Several times I’d find myself in the equipment screen tapping the B button to go back with nothing happening. I thought it was pretty cool that there was a ‘patch notes’ item listed on the main menu but when you pop into it, there hasn’t been an update since July. Which I think leads into Gordian Quest’s biggest existential conundrum.
Because the entire time I played Gordian Quest I kept asking myself, why did this game exist? The campaign is a long and winding trail of loosely strung together plot points and humdrum quest objectives. After a few hours of gameplay your encounters amount to roughly the same things in a monotonous rhythm that does little to excite. Even realm mode felt underwhelming, being essentially a branching-path version of the campaign without the ability to go back to town.
The Final Word
Games should exist and designers should always make games but Gordian Quest offers nothing new and does nothing exceptionally well.
MonsterVine Rating: 2.5 out of 5 – Mediocre
