A lot of quests have little twists in them, where the person hiring you didn't tell you the whole story or where things just get out of hand and you find yourself with more than one valid way of 'completing' the quest, up to and including failing it on purpose, forfeiting the reward and putting you at odds with the person who hired you. There's always two sides to a story, and you are always given the chance to choose sides. Intriguing moral choices pop up naturally throughout the game, and your responses to them aren't tacked on in cutscenes - they're a natural part of the existing mechanics. The game is also surprisingly well written. Failing doesn't feel punishing, because you're always moving forwards in something, unlocking some new content or learning something that helps you strategize for your next run.
Building and playing with a well honed deck can feel really satisfying, and figuring out how to make a good deck is made accessible by the game's replayability. The more you use one strategy, the better you get at it.
Choosing to fight or talk through a problem means choosing which of your two decks to use, and using a deck gives both experience to upgrade your cards and a chance to add new cards to the deck. Negotiation and combat each have a dedicated deck with its own set of rules and a handful of different approaches available. Griftlands is also not just one but two very well designed deckbuilder card games. Either way, the game rewards you after every run with a bit of progress towards unlocking permanent perks and difficulty modifiers to help you hone any chosen playstyle.Īnd there are a lot of playstyles. Want to be a silver-tongued slick talker, avoiding conflicts through wits and negotiation? Give it a try, and then whether you win or die, you can start over and try a more combat-focused approach. The game always offers you more than one way to progress, and are given a lot of freedom both in a single run and in between runs to choose the playstyle you want. This means that you get to screw around in the story, experimenting not just with different playstyles but with different versions of your main character.
Griftlands is a Roguelite, so it is intended to be replayed many, many times. Then I died, restarted, and realized the genius of the game. As I kept playing, I got a taste for the mechanics and found them enjoyable. In theory, I really like games with complex systems where 'your choices matter,' but in practice, they tend to exhaust me, and I rarely finish them. It was extremely reminiscent of old-school CRPGs, games like classic Fallout or Baldur's Gate, where you're given a lot of freedom and a lot of information right from the beginning, and you have to figure things out for yourself. When I first booted up Griftlands, I was slightly anxious about its busy UI and constant decision making.