izigame.me

I had the feeling after blacking out and playing non-stop for the whole day of release that Wildfrost would instantly become recognized as a staple for deckbuilding strategy games, because it absolutely is one, and I am extremely disappointed to see so many people levy vague and shallow complaints about balance and difficulty before showing its quirks any patience.
No, the game isn't impossible or unbalanced, but its challenges have sharp teeth that require you to navigate its encounters carefully, sometimes very precisely, to make it through each run. The game's combat is a strategy game with a lot of depth; you have to hide your hero safely, shuffle your positioning constantly to divide incoming damage, and use every tool in your arsenal to solve problems by delaying or defeating especially vicious enemies. The ways out of bad situations aren't obvious, but they are there, and the more you grow accustomed to the game's strict sequencing, the easier and more exciting they become to see.
That aside, this is an extremely fun game, and much more approachable than its initial reception would make it seem. A roguelite deckbuilder where deploying creatures and managing tough board states (comparable to Monster Train) makes up the bulk of its gameplay, with a really smooth pacing of single encounters against multiple waves and a boss chopped up by several upgrade/modification/event/shop/removal nodes in a row. You get a ton of back-to-back upgrade options for your loadout, which are extremely customizable as upgrades are handled by finding Charms that add keywords, stat modifications, etc. to applicable cards you have, with each card being able to hold up to three--by the end of each run, you could be playing with many cards you've seen before, but ended up with totally different versions of them depending on what upgrades you found. This is a really fun system and adds a lot of inherent variety to the game (and comes back at higher difficulties to add the same kind of variety to basic enemies.)
It takes a very delicate hand to make a game that constantly gives you a feeling that you're not going to make it through this encounter, but as you play to your outs, you'll be surprised by the fact that you can, and it'll always be on the back of many different cards and mechanics working together exactly as well as they need to. The enemy designs are tight and varied, with bosses asking very different things of you to make sure you have tools to handle many different challenges, and there's a twist on the final boss design that gives you a very clear warning about what you need to be able to handle by the end of the run.
Finally, I'm not sure what more I could add to what's already been said for the game's style. It's to die for. There's so much joy, energy, and personality in every single inch of the game. I've finally put the game down to sleep and I'm still hearing that catchy battle theme.
If you like deckbuilders, card games, roguelites--the whole genre, definitely give this game a try. And if you did, and you find yourself struggling and frustrated with it, I would encourage you to give it a little more patience. The game requires different approaches to its challenges than its neighbors, but if you really pay attention to all the tools at your disposal, you'll find a deeply rewarding game here.
Also, it really bothers me to see some people blaming difficulty on luck. The game has very little combat RNG. You see your whole deck in 2-3 hand cycles; I've had a run where after enough removals I drew my entire deck on every redraw. The rules for targeting are clear, and even Aimless can be reasonably manipulated, especially incoming attacks.
Some cards/units seem so much better than others, with many looking underwhelming in their base forms--this feels intentional, because the way upgrades scale with game mechanics is multiplicative. A small ATK boost on a unit with Barrage or Frenzy adds up very quickly. An innocuous AoE spell in your deck could suddenly become a win condition by attaching an on-hit delay to it. And unlike traditional deck-building games like Slay the Spire, you can draw into your whole deck so quickly that once you've assembled a strategy, your access to it becomes extremely consistent, as at any point you can pass one count to redraw 6-7 cards. Every shop has an affordable option to select a card in your deck and play it at the beginning of every encounter.
The game has so many systems designed specifically to give you consistency and control. But it doesn't give you solutions to its challenging encounters for free. You have to be perceptive to the unrealized potential of each card for things as simple as having a promising keyword to work with, and build around strong synergies, rather than expect to find a single completed item to round out a single approach.
I feel that I have to address criticisms like this just because I don't want others to miss this gem of a game because of negative first-reactions that fundamentally misunderstand it.