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TLDR: Decent CCG with a unique matching board concept. Largely fails to impress due to majority of cards being subpar for deck mechanics.


PROS:

✅Interesting gameplay mechanics with the matching board
✅Solid deck themes
✅Good “Customizable” difficulty

CONS:

➖The matching board attacks can be too punishing at times
➖Uncreative from a roguelike card perspective (Almost a copy of Slay the Spire)
➖Double the RNG with match board and decks
➖Many cards and trinkets are just plain bad
You’re going to see me mention Slay the Spire a ton here, so here is my review for comparison's sake: https://steamcommunity.com/id/Synikx/recommended/646570?snr=1_5_9__402

Content (Game world/Narrative/Length) –

Game World: Demon’s Mirror (DM) takes place in a game world that is very similar to Slay the Spire (StS) - you have your battle world and the pathing map. The pathing map is nearly identical to StS, you have your battles/elites, bonfires, shops, and events. Just some mechanics are flipped around, like shops don’t offer discard options, they only do upgrades.
The battle world is where DM really changes things up, mostly through the matching board that inhabits the entire right side of the screen. Other than the matching board, you have your enemies, trinkets, scrolls (potions) and can easily view all their information and enemy intents. The matching board is interesting how integrated it is into the gameplay, but I’ll cover that more in the mechanics area.
Overall, aside from the matching board, DM has an almost 1:1 match to StS. While imitation is the best form of flattery, and StS is one of my favorite games, I can’t help but acknowledge how absurdly similar they are. It's like the devs played StS and decided to remake the entire game with very slight changes, at least from the game world perspective. Mechanically things start to diverge, but it's almost shocking how much of an obvious influence StS was on DM.
Narrative: Small and insignificant story. There is some semblance of a story and how the end is connected to the beginning, but it's not the point of the game.
Length: It can be relatively short, like all roguelikes, you can complete a single run within an hour or two. Single runs are generally slower here in DM than StS. The true value in the length is the replayability, and I think that DM has less reasons to play it repeatedly.

Gameplay (Mechanics/Difficulty) –

Mechanics: This is where the tiny nuances of DM start to differ from StS, thankfully. So, right off the bat the biggest part of DM that differentiates itself is the matching board. You can match like icons infinitely touching and diagonally. You have 4 match options - shield, attack, and 2 different resources green and purple. Green powers up card abilities, but fades slowly over each turn. Purple allows you to do 1 of 3 options, unique to each character.
Speaking of characters, there are 3 options - your more attack-focused brawler, the damage-over-time type, and the combo-focused DoT type. I’m very much oversimplifying here, but I do feel like each character is different enough to where it's not so much an obvious copy of StS as the game world is. The matching board integrates nicely mechanically with each character - each has different methods of utilizing the board to compliment their kit.
I think for me the problem comes with the cards itself. Most of the cards I’ve seen, especially “Build-defining” rare cards like you get after boss fights, are just boring at best and detrimental at worst. I would often struggle to find any good cards to add to my deck. I completed 1 winning run as Wulf and ended it with about ~15 cards in my deck, skipping tons, to create a strength deck that used a multi-attack card to one-shot enemies. It just feels like poor design when a huge amount of your cards do not feel exciting to get in a CCG game.
So is DM better than StS? I don’t think so, but I also don’t think it's bad. I applaud the match board, but I do wish there were cards that focused on using it 100% instead of just being a side component. It seems like each character has a sort of build to focus on, but each build only uses the board to collect green resources, while the others are more of an option if you need them. This leads to the board being underutilized because you have attack and defense in your deck, while the purple buffs are ehh… TBH, I think the board should be buffed to make it more useful - 2x attack and 2x shield could make it much more useful, especially because shields fall off so hard later in the game.

Difficulty: I think that DM is harder than StS. Maybe it's just that StS has better deck themes to exploit, but in DM, I was using all of the optional boons from the start and was only able to finish a single complete run within 7 hours. For all intents and purposes, if I enable every possible buff that lowers my end score, the game should be considered easy mode, but that isn’t so much the case here.
Speaking of buffs, I do really like how the difficulty works. You choose different modifiers that help or hinder your gameplay to create a type of personalized difficulty.

Graphics (Quality/Performance) –

Quality: The one area that DM surpasses StS in my opinion is the graphics and animations. There are battle animations and movements here in DM that StS simply doesn’t have without mods.
Aside from that, the UI is also almost the same, which is a great thing because StS has a wonderful UI that shows the player tons of information, so if anything were to be copied it should definitely be the UI. You can mouse over icons to see what they do and cards define their abilities when hovered over. Even easier here in DM is to quickly view the card upgrade by right-clicking. Great job.
Performance: I encountered no bugs or performance issues.
i9-13900KF | RTX 4090 | 64GB RAM | 1440p @ 240hz | installed on SSD

Audio (Sound Effects/Music) –

Sound Effects: Basic. Cards and match board all have sound effects. There is no voice acting that I noticed.
Music: Nothing really interesting.

Replay Factor (Longevity) –

Not tons of replay value, but decent, as expected with most roguelikes. You can do repeat runs to unlock cards and trinkets. Aside from unlocks and achievements, there are no leaderboards or daily runs. DM could really use some sort of online aspect to have longevity.

Final Verdict –

Demon’s Mirror brings some good and unique concepts to the CCG roguelike area. For me, the major thing that makes the game worse than Slay the Spire is that the cards do not feel worthwhile to get. This should be #1 priority in any CCG game is to nail your cards and make your deck builds interesting. DM is close in this regard, I believe some tweaks to make the match board more worthwhile and a buff/redesign on half the cards could go a long way.
I do recommend this game, but I also believe there are much better options out there.

Recommend?


Yes

You can find my curator page here: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Synik_GR