A card-based, DnD, RPG? Welcome to Gordian Quest. Going into this review, I didn’t expect much from the game. What I received absolutely blew me away. Developer Mixed Realms Pte Ltd and Swag Soft Holdings Pte Ltd did the impossible by taking multiple genres and putting them together to make an incredibly balanced game. While not everything is roses with Gordian Quest, the dozen you do get are gorgeous.
Let’s get right into it.
Simple Story
Official Synopsis (via Steam)
A sinister curse corrupts the land. Darkness reigns. Monsters roam. Scoundrels loot. Cowards flee. Heroes emerge.
Lead heroes on an adventure to save what’s left of this fallen world and destroy the root of evil abound. Will you fall at the claws of your enemies or the consequences of your poor decisions? Your Gordian Quest is about to begin.
The structure of this story is simple in its nature. Essentially, you’re caught up in a quest to help a small town that is initially just waiting to be overtaken by a rift lord who is spreading evil across the land. It’s a typical RPG story where the heroes come to save the day and build up their character sheets along the journey. At its core, it is very basic in its narrative nature. Just for the record, basic doesn’t mean bad. It means it fits the needs. The big plus with the story is that 7-10 hours in, you think you’re about to beat the game and then you find out that you’re just moving to the next act. This is like how I felt with Ghost of Tsushima, where I spent an insane amount of time in the beginning only to find out that acts two and three were waiting for me. Much like Ghost of Tsushima, I couldn’t be happier to see there was more story to be told. I don’t like giving away too much of the story, so I will stop there.
Ultimately, the story is good, but not over-the-top great. Honestly, that won’t matter one bit because of the gameplay design.
Seriously, the gameplay design
While the story didn’t really hook me at the beginning, the design of the actual gameplay is what sold me. No joke, this game is a combination of so many RPG-related genres that juggling all of them without dropping one of them is impressive as hell. It is only respectful and fitting to break each gameplay design component down. Here is what you’re in for:
Card Battles
There are a lot of card battle games out there in the gaming world. Typically, they take PhDs to understand and appreciate, while also replicating whoever did whatever the month before. There are a lot of them, and they usually don’t deviate from the blueprint. That’s a good and bad thing. It’s good because you can pick up pretty much any card battle game and get hooked quickly. It’s bad because there is virtually no variation in the structure. Now, Gordian Quest isn’t going to break any new ground, but it does something wonderful by simplifying this part of the gameplay knowing that the user will have to think about a few other elements. With this gameplay component, you can do the basics like stack your decks, gain new cards, and work with SP to strategically play them all during battle – it’s not complicated at all. You can also upgrade cards throughout the game. Unlike other games that give good cards a finite time to exist, Gordian Quest allows you to upgrade them to keep them around longer. Being a person that doesn’t like change too much, I can dig it.
The most complicated part of card battles isn’t choosing the right card or waiting around to see a random drop turn perfect, but it’s avoiding exhausting your cards. I didn’t know this was a ‘thing’ in card battles, but if it’s not, it should be. This took me time to understand. If you use too many cards too many times without making camp and resting, you get your cards restricted with a blank side that just says ‘Exhausted’. This makes sense because your player is executing the action, so if you had to stab a monster 100 times, you would probably be exhausted too. I know I would be.
The only way to bring exhausted cards back is to rest. You can do this via camping, or you can go back to a town and stay at an inn. Either way, you’re forced to stop and rest. It’s an intriguing and interesting way for this game to go, as it does put a pause on the gameplay unless you want to risk the biscuit and try your best exhausted (it doesn’t end well). Regardless of your decision, it’s a neat strategic complication that temporarily gums up smooth sailing in the gameplay design. It’s on purpose and it works in that capacity. It’s an element you must think about during gameplay. Again, it’s a strategic point of the gameplay design.
Anyway, getting back to simplicity, the card variety and balance are quite good. The variety leans towards whoever is in your party. For me, I had a knight, a brute, and a magician/mage. Each one had cards that suited them and only them. The knight had a lot of sword-swinging action, while the brute enjoyed punching holes through enemies. The magician/mage was more of a long-distance shooter. The cards represented their strengths and their defenses. There was plenty of variety to choose from during my gameplay session and it all was easy to understand.
As for the balanced part, it always seemed like I was ahead of the enemies in some capacity. I never felt I was ever going to lose a fight because of the cards each character drew, and nothing ever felt unfair or out-of-whack when facing enemies. The reason for this is that I had a good balance of offense and defense with all my characters which guaranteed me the best chance of winning even when the odds didn’t seem in my favor. When I needed my brute to be brutal, I seemed to have a card to really knock back the enemies. When I needed extra protection or more life, a card always seemed to be in the fold to accomplish these needs. There might have been 2-3 times during my entire review process where I felt like I couldn’t pull through, but for the most part, the game just seemed very balanced.
What was also balanced about Gordian Quest was how the attacks went down. There were multiple rows for my team and enemies to reside on with restrictions on how far over you could go from left to right. In true tabletop fashion, you are given a card to allow you to move up/down/left/right/diagonally one space. There were spots where you couldn’t reach the enemy due to distance and vice-versa. This played into the strategy of the game, especially when your character was hurt in battle. The gameboard is simple in its construction and the card play on said board was easily understood. There was not a lot to ingest to get on board with the card-based system and it seemed like it had more in it than most without asking too much from the player. In short, the use of the cards was as balanced and fair as the cards themselves and worked perfectly with attack positioning.
Enough about cards, let’s talk about old-school DnD.
DnD
The DnD component in Gordian Quest is complimentary to the card battle component. In a traditional DnD manner, the player would happen upon certain spots on the gaming map (a series of connecting lines leading to various places like shrines, enemies, campfires, portals, treasure maps, and giant question marks). Some of the spaces send you to text-based short adventures, which require you to make a branching narrative decision. Some request that you roll a die to see if you make it out of the situation or if you fail. And just as you might expect, when you choose this route with these moments, you find yourself rolling a 20-sided die that either puts your life in peril, upgrades/downgrades cards or sees you out of sticky situations with success. It’s a huge bonus when you can add stats to cards, which is one of the possibilities when you land in these situations. More importantly, these DnD type of moments helps to break away from just being a card battle game. They add some new, short flavor to the gameplay design that mixes in perfectly with the card battle design.
Now, what’s even more of a throwback to the DnD days with this component in the game is how the game itself is mapped out. As I mentioned prior, the movement structure is a series of spots on a map with connecting bridges. You can move to-and-fro between the spots and reveal new spots through successful conquering on the gameboard. This is akin to Intellivision’s Dungeons and Dragons game. It’s eerily similar to that if I’m remembering it correctly. I could google it, but I don’t want to be wrong.
Anyway, the DnD component is easy to pick up on and changes the gameplay just enough to add a new piece that makes the whole feel balanced.
We’re going to bring this review home with the RPG component.
RPG
The role-playing game component of Gordian Quest is so much more than I expected out of this game. First and foremost, you have a large, and I mean large skills tree to work with. Honestly, when I first saw the tree, I was like, “Come on. This is small. I’m going to have this thing filled out in no time.” I wasn’t wrong. Within the first 2-3 hours of playing, I completed the tree with all my skill points earned from battling the baddies and succeeding on missions. And then something extraordinary happened…I earned another point. I thought to myself, “What a waste! What am I supposed to do with that?” Oh, I don’t know, maybe open another skills tree and manually connect it to my existing skills tree. Whoa. Yep. The game has an extensive skills tree on the backend that is large. This also means that when you complete the first story, there’s more to come. And that is still exciting.
Anyway, the skills tree focuses on upgrading cards, gaining more life, strength, and other attributes that help you along the way. The tree also allows you to swap talents you unlock and reset the tree from the top. It’s extensive and complicated in its design, but easy to use and understand on the player side.
Now, before I start daydreaming my way to making time and returning to the game, let me note that other RPG elements in the game include the following:
Various characters: You’re not stuck with your companions. In some Phantasy Star II crazy fashion, you can choose new characters to take with you and build them up slowly. You can pick and choose different types of classes and exchange them back and forth depending on your adventure. It’s such a cool part of the game. I totally didn’t use that because I hate change, but I know a good chunk of gamers will find ways to use this option to their advantage. Bravo to you, brave gamers.
Crafting, weapons/armor, and whatnot: Still not a fan of it, but you can craft items. It’s neat and it works with simplicity. You can add ornaments to weapons and upgrade them with special attributes. You can gain weapons through adventure, buy weapons and armor through the fruits of your labor, and basically everything you can think of that you can do in a normal RPG, you can do here.
The RPG component is the wonderful last piece to this trio of genres. It completes yet another aspect of Gordian Quest that I didn’t know made it better. It gives you the motivation to keep playing and to keep getting better. It also motivates you to mix/match ornaments on weapons/armor to find the strongest combinations. It’s all quite brilliant and a beautiful piece to this entire puzzle.
All these components make for a wonderful experience with Gordian Quest. It’s a unique gameplay experience that treats each component of its design differently, but also quite delicately with care and balance.
A couple of complaints
I wouldn’t be a critic if I didn’t nitpick about something, right? Well, I have a couple of things on my mind that could have been improved. They’re not dealbreakers by any stretch, but I think the next iteration of the game should consider them. Anyway, on with the show:
Enemy Variety
The first act of this game has a lot of plain enemies to fight. That’s typical of any RPG until you move along into the next section, but groups of enemies really didn’t offer up incredibly different experiences. At times, they felt repetitive until you fought a boss or mini-boss. That’s not to say you’ll notice because you’ll be fumbling around with a good variety of cards, but they needed a bit more variety in this area. Again, not a dealbreaker, but something to consider for the future. It should be noted that when you move into a different land you do get more of a variety, but, again, that is expected from an RPG.
Difficulty
I can’t tell whether I was just going into fights with balanced heroes and cards or if the game was just slightly less difficult and more in my favor. Being a cynic, I must go with the latter and say that I wish it was a tiny bit more difficult. While the game does ratchet up the brutality of enemies to ‘11’ when you move to different lands, it just felt like I was cruising at times from one enemy spot to another. Just pure domination. I could have upped the normal difficulty setting to something else, but honestly, I shouldn’t have to spice up my own meal. It should be spicy enough when it gets to my table. That said, I do appreciate the ability to see the entire game move along quickly for review purposes. It felt good to succeed in such a balanced gameplay environment.
Other than these complaints, I don’t have else to gripe about. The game is absolutely a gem. These are easily correctable complaints as well (says the guy who isn’t a developer). In the next iteration of Gordian Quest I would like more from these categories, but not too much, please.
Anyway, if you’ve made it this far, bless you. Let’s wrap this up.
Conclusion
Gordian Quest is a trio of genres that show what a good and balanced game looks like. It is certainly one of the better gaming experiences I have been through so far in 2022. It does have some minor issues, but nothing that will distract you from its terrific and balanced gameplay.
