As a general rule, I suck at roguelikes and roguelites. But I do love a good deck-builder in the genre. When I found Monster Train, I spent about a week doing very little other than playing it. When I started Slay The Spire, I was astonished to realize that it took up more of my time than gacha games designed to addict you and suck away your life. So when Elemental Exiles rolled around, I thought, ‘Awesome! Let’s get started.’
I did not stay that enthusiastic for long.
A Thousand Words
Something this game did that immediately sets it apart from Slay The Spire (and given how similar they are in other ways, that matters a lot) is the storytelling. Every fight has flavor text before it. Every character has a backstory with a reason they’re an “exile” and a reason to keep fighting. The stories, while simple, make sense and flow from one boss to the next. They’re a little cheesy, a little corny, make me laugh a little, and they’re by far the best part of the game.
And on the subject of narrative, Elemental Exiles fixes a problem that Slay The Spire has. In this game, I don’t actively avoid narrative encounters, in fact, I seek them out. Narrative encounters can offer upgraded cards, increased health or maximum health, or even remove all the wound cards in your deck. They can also, of course, screw you over with no way to get away because it’s a narrative, not a fight. But that’s better than a certain other game where I actively dodged every one of these events that I could because they all seemed to suck. I think I saw less than five different events while playing Slay The Spire because I always took the other route if I had a choice.
I also love being able to see the whole map and plan my routes more than I can in other games. You can actually unlock most of the characters by finding them on the map and defeating them, and once you’ve fought a boss, the boss icon is replaced with their sprite for all future runs. As there’s no healing, being able to path toward a merchant is huge.
I also really like the cards. The combination of element, type, and durability gives you a lot to play with. There are cards that chain off of other elements, off of other types, there are even cards that chain off of negative cards to give you bonuses. There were moments when I was playing where I could chain together these cards to do massive damage, interrupt a boss’s big attack, and shield myself from the little guys. That’s what a deck builder should do. Those moments, when you can literally play your cards right to be an absolute god-tier champion at the game, are what you play deck builders for.
So what the creators have done here is: they made a cool world, with a full map, cultures for the various types of people, stories for the different characters you can play, little nuggets of comedy gold, and a card system with cool combos and excellent layers of strategy–
–and then they ruined it with the rest of the game.
Head, Meet Wall. Repeatedly.
The elemental system is important enough to show up in the title, so it makes sense that the game would focus on it, but it comes with a drawback. A few drawbacks, actually. Actually, some of them are unrelated design decisions that I only suspect are a result of wanting the elemental system to be front and center.
Look. Roguelikes are supposed to be punishing and difficult. I get that. I’ve played them for enough hours to have had that drilled into me very hard. But they’re also meant for failing forward. For feeling that you’re making progress even while you lose over and over. For feeling that you have a chance in hell of managing it, eventually, if you just keep at it.
Elemental Exiles didn’t give me those feelings. It must do that for some people because the version 1.0 notes included an addition of a “very hard” mode that apparently some players asked for. But for me, the game was a morass of problems that there was no feasible way to solve.
See, the way the elemental system works is that your blocks are twice as effective against the element they’re strong against, and they’re half as effective against the element they’re weak against. And this goes in exactly the order you’d think it does (fire beats nature beats water beats fire). Likewise, your damage is twice as effective against enemy blocks of the element it’s strong against, and it’s half as effective against enemy blocks of the element it’s weak against.
However (and I believe this happened because the elemental system is so integral to the game), there is almost no healing in the game and virtually no way to cleanse negative effects like poison. You are meant to block almost every attack and to interrupt basically every interruptible attack. But there’s just no way to actually do that.
One problem is energy. Unlike other games in the genre, you don’t get the ability to upgrade your baseline energy throughout the game. You have five energy for the entirety of the game, so cards that cost three energy feel like a joke. There’s a blessing you might be able to get that gives you one extra energy for a limited number of battles, but I’ve only gotten it to show up twice, and it wears off after a limited number of battles. One of those times was my one successful run at beating the final boss. Surprising absolutely no one, I did it with the mind flayer. Who could have guessed, I do best when given a worshiper of Definitely Not Cthulhu.
Then there’s the sheer amount of damage and “screw you” buttons that the enemies have ready to dish out. So in order to block everything, you need to have a lot of blocks of all different elements ready, but you can’t over-invest into blocks because you also need to have multi-hit cards to interrupt enemies’ biggest attacks. But multi-hit abilities usually hit for less, so you need to have big single-hit attacks, too. And what do you do if, in the mix of everything you have to have in your deck, you don’t draw what you need? Well, you die. A lot. And you don’t get anything for it.
But Wait! There’s More!
You can also avoid every attack by enemies for an entire fight and still end up limping away, down 20 HP and with a deck stuffed with wound cards because, for some reason, about half a dozen basic monsters have “deal damage when they get hit” effects that stack with “unblocked attacks add wounds to your deck” effects. Wounds are typically one-shot cards that cost zero energy but have negative effects, like doing damage or inflicting weakness. So you need to use your blocks so that you don’t get killed by retribution damage from trying to kill things using attacks that you already can barely afford and have to spread between interrupting big moves, penetrating blocks and just killing the things before they kill you. And good luck doing it with your roughly 60 max HP, which there’s no point in increasing because the only time max HP matters is if you heal with a merchant. Since you’re never going to be even close to max HP anyway, who cares…
A lot of this aggravation could be alleviated with a couple of cards that heal for 2 or 3 HP or give just 2 regen. This would even be fairly easy to balance because of the game’s durability system. Cards all have finite durability, and when they’re used up, they’re used up. Or if merchants had a 75-gold heal before the 100-gold heal. But healing and cleanse effects are so rare that even the most basic fight ends up feeling punishing in a way that just isn’t fun.
In fact, healing is so reserved that the character who heals just 2 HP between fights has a full 15 lower maximum health than basically every other character. So when things start going downhill, you may as well start a new run, because it’s not going to get any better. And it drives me nuts, because there’s a soup of about five or six different frustration factors, and if it was three or four of them, or you had a couple of forgiving mechanics that didn’t feel so dreadfully unattainable, this game would be so much more fun and so much less frustrating. Instead, I hit the button to erase my run and start over about four times in ten minutes because it felt so pointless.
The Bottom Line
You remember how I said that there were rants we didn’t have time for? Yeah…there’s at least one more that I didn’t even allude to, that I could give a good two to three paragraphs on if I wanted this review to get even more bloated than it already is. This game frustrates me because it is so many of the things I like, and I so badly want it to be more fun than it is. But I can only review the game I played.
In a really weird way, this game reminds me of Cultist Simulator. Not because they’re both digital card games that have roguelike elements. No, there’s a different reason that these games feel similar, and it’s sadly not a reason that makes either of them look good.
I have 162.6 hours of play time in Cultist Simulator on PC. I rated it “Do not recommend” on Steam because, while there were times I felt like the Eldritch-deity-empowered cult leader extraordinaire you’re trying to be in the game, there was also a really unpleasant feeling that came anytime I lost in the game. It was a feeling like “All that work down the drain.” It was a moment that made me think, every time, ‘I don’t know how to not do that again.’ In the end I only beat Cultist Simulator by save scumming and relying heavily on the Wiki.
Elemental Exiles is a lot less punishing than Cultist Simulator, in that the time it takes to get through a run is a lot shorter. But when I lose in this game, even if it only took me an hour, I don’t feel like going back into it. I don’t feel like I advanced or progressed toward being able to win next time. I just have that feeling again of “All that work down the drain.” In the end I set it to easy mode, hoping that would ease the frustration. It didn’t. I beat the game once, on easy, using the mind flayer, and unlocked the last character. And then? I felt no real impulse to pick it up again. Not to try a different character, not to play it on normal. In fact, my feeling was, “Oh good. I beat it. I can stop now.”
Here’s the thing: this game is so frustrating to me, and you can feel my frustration throughout this review. But it still has those moments. You know the ones, if you’ve ever played a deckbuilder. The ones where your engine does exactly what it’s supposed to, you chain together cards for maximum effect, and you feel like an absolute god as you dish out more damage in one turn than your opponent has in the entire fight. And if the game was tuned to be a little more forgiving (just a little; it’s still a roguelike, after all) it would be a really good game. The fact that it can’t be just a little less punishing, just a little more forgiving, just a little more fun, that frustrates me even more.
