Spellrune is a Slay the Spire clone. I use that term for the sake of brevity rather than to be derogatory – people used to call first-person shooters ‘Doom clones’, after all – but that description immediately lets us understand what we’re dealing with, and avoids a lot of unnecessary repetition from my coverage of that earlier game. Released by Microlith Games through Steam Early Access on September 21st, 2018, it never made it to a version 1.0. That makes this the first unfinished game we’re covering. There may be some reasons for that.
Premise and Gameplay
Choose a character, move room to room, fight some enemies, fight some elites champions to gain relics artifacts, then take down a boss at the end of the floor. You know how this works. I promise you I’m not being lazy in my description. The screenshots, never mind video footage if you can find what little is out there, speak for themselves.
There is a degree of customisability to your class. Not only can you change your appearance (somewhat bafflingly using a slider interface for a predefined set of options that are not on any sort of spectrum), but you can mix and match the type of magic you specialise in. You can pick from one of three types of offensive cards (Arcane, Fire, and Frost), and three types of defensive cards (Holy, Nature, and Shadow), for a total of nine possible combinations. I went for an Arcane/Holy build. I can’t tell you anything firsthand about the other potential builds because… I only ever played one run.
Imagine my shock when I got to the end of the third floor expecting to take on a final boss and it turned out that there was another ‘act’ full of rooms waiting for me. I may never know how certain of a feature this is, but it seems to function as an ‘endless’ mode by default. Just keep going until you die, which I never could. Through a combination of the sheer number of damage multiplying cards and enemy-nerfing artifacts I’d picked up, nothing could touch me. I got to the end of the sixth floor and ninetieth-odd room before tapping out – not due to difficulty, but because I couldn’t play for longer than two hours before forfeiting my right to a Steam refund. I’m sorry, but this is a hobby.
Another couple of quirks: health isn’t automatically recovered between rooms, which didn’t do anything to counteract my broken build. Rest spots allow you to recover, upgrade cards, or look for treasure, which can net you an extra potion or card, much like winning an encounter. Some of my Holy cards allowed me to directly heal health as well as block damage outright, but this is completely redundant. You have a hard set maximum HP limit, but there is never a limit to how much block you can put up (except for the fact you lose block after each turn). I can’t see any benefit to the risk of filling your deck with potentially unusable healing cards instead of defending cards, which you can always ignore until necessary.
Randomised Elements
Oh, it’s random, alright. Let me give you a bit of an overview of the highlights of the only run I had with Spellrune. The second fight put me up against four enemies at once, all of whom were very happy to debuff, block, and attack in fairly equal measure. This almost ended in death right out the gate despite playing what I felt to be the best possible cards in my hand from a fairly limited starting deck every turn.
The boon-granting artifacts dramatically turned my fortunes, however. I fought two champions back to back. My first reward automatically slapped all future enemies with a ‘freeze’ status for the first two rounds of combat, preventing them from taking any actions whatsoever. My second reward did the same thing, but for three rounds of combat instead of two. Now, get this – they stacked. Every single fight from then on started with a free five uninterrupted rounds to do whatever I pleased without the enemy having any chance for reprisal. Even if the game could end, I had already won – fewer than 10 rooms in.
This got me thinking. While I was certainly steamrolling the game having done almost nothing of tactical merit to deserve it, this was a very different form of engagement than I was used to from the genre. The fun of these games usually comes from overcoming gradually mounting challenges, fine-tuning your deck to draw more optimal hands. That said, I cannot deny that I was, for about 15 minutes, having a lot of fun I don’t normally see in this subgenre that strives for challenge. I would enter a room, immediately crush the enemy without them taking a single turn, then do it again and again. I was making money faster than I could spend it all buying every available artifact at every shop I came across. Inevitably, this became boring – but it’s a type of forbidden, beta-testing enjoyment that game designers usually try very hard to prevent you from encountering. Outside of tutorials or opening levels, this type of thing usually lays the game’s mechanics a little too bare or makes the gameplay seem too shallow. I can only judge Spellrune on what is currently available, but I think this type of experience would have been among the first things they’d have tried to eliminate. Well, besides the bugs. The game kept softlocking itself at victory reward screens. This is arguably the worst possible place to have your game stop functioning because it kills the player’s desire to continue stone dead – they have to redo the whole fight. That may have been more of an issue had any of the fights lasted longer than one turn, but you see what I’m getting at, hopefully.
After I’d picked up my 48th (forty-eighth!) artifact, the game stopped adding them to my collection, although it was happy for me to waste money by trying to buy more in shops. That was where I gave up. Now that adding cards was pointless, the reward system was stuck in a loop where the only thing it could give me was more money, yet the only things I could buy with it were no longer usable. All reasons to persevere were gone.
Presentation
I must stress, the game isn’t finished, so it’s fair to think that had the developers had more time and the game was completed, we wouldn’t have issues like the game randomly softlocking after winning fights, or that telltale tangible Unity chug every time the enemy passes turn to you. The stage selection map has no background whatsoever, which is very jarring. Every time you complete a room, your character steps through a portal to the next stage, which takes several seconds and cannot be skipped. All this aside, there’s a nice Monster Slayers-esque design sensibility to the enemies; positively Newgroundish in their colouring and simple bobbing animations. The music is serviceable. The sound effects are fine. The problem with such faint praise is that it seems all the more damning after such a laundry list of criticisms, but given its strong similarity to certain other games, a unique presentation would have really gone a long way to keeping the game memorable, even if it never got completed.
Closing Remarks
Unfortunately, I cannot think of a reason (other than this very project) to play Spellrune in 2024. I never want to believe a developer is acting in bad faith, because I cannot imagine that even a rushed, heavily derivative game is worth the time, energy, or lost goodwill from customers just because a certain genre is currently in vogue. These days, Microlith Games’ website redirects to something completely unrelated. I hope one day I’ll have a chance to contact them about what exactly the goal was and what happened. On the other hand, I can confidently say that this is the first and only game I’ve covered here that I never won or lost a run on!
Standout Cards
Shrunken Shrine 