Demon's Mirror Review (Lykurgos)
Short and Lazy Review
Fuse Slay the Spire with a chain-3 game, and you have Demon’s Mirror.
Key note. Chain-3, not Match-3. With Match-3, you swap the position of board symbols to create a 3, 4 or 5 block. With Chain-3, you drag a line through as many symbols of the same kind as you can, so long as they are adjacent, orthogonally or diagonally.
Concise Review
Set aside the chain-3 board temporarily, and Demon’s Mirror follows the Slay-a-like formula closely.
# Begin with a starter deck and a starter artefact / trinket unique to a character, which strongly influences what they are better at
# Choose your path on a branching map of nodes with battles, Elite battles, rest sites, shops, events and deck manipulation sites
# Progress through multiple acts, each act ending in a boss fight
# Battles are a turn-based card-playing tightrope of trying to deal damage whilst avoiding taking damage, and wins result in card and coin rewards
# During a run, you add, remove and upgrade cards, gain permanent passively run-changing trinkets and single-use scrolls
Then what it does differently, which also changes all the card-based play, is give you a 6x6 board of gems, representing attack, defence, a form of power-up and a form of limit-break currency, 4 total.
You have the 3 energy points, same as Slay, initially, but you split them between playing cards or creating chains.
Each battle turn then presents a tactical dilemma, what is the best combination of cards and
chains?
Highlights?
Super slick and responsive
Slay has a magical quality of a near frictionless sequence of card-select, drag to target, release, outcome, with immediate feedback and that little dopamine hit that accompanies it.
Demon’s Mirror has that, 100%. Everything executes slickly and feels goldilocks, just right.
Simple innovation > great tactical challenge
Many turns give you a wonderful little tactical dilemma. On any given turn, you may have choices like these:
# Play 2-3 chains but no cards
# Play 3 or more cards, but no chains
# Split your energy between chains and cards
Which is the best will also change based on how you can change the board state *before* chaining, through cards – often 0 cost – that destroy, convert or move gems around.
You have a LOT of scope for setting up over several turns for a huge attack, for example, by removing other types of gems from the board to create a long chain of attack gems, applying a vulnerable debuff to enemies, and a chain buff to yourself.
Great synergy between cards and board
Many cards can manipulate the board state, and it appears – initially – viable to really lean in to either a card-heavy or a board-heavy deck. The cards and the board interact with each other – a lot – requiring careful thought both in battle and in the overall deck building.
Caveats?
Learning Curve
Take the learning curve of any deckbuilder – it can be tough initially as you try and figure out what the heck makes a viable deck. This has that challenge AND then the added complexity of the chain-3 side. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but I could imagine that non-veterans of both genres might find the learning pretty harsh initially.
Meta Progression
Writing this only 3-4 run attempts in, I can say little just yet. There *are* things to unlock, including the core characters and buffs and debuffs that can be applied to an entire run to change the challenge level.