izigame.me

I want to preface this review by saying I've got 600 hours in Slay the Spire and I go back just to try and improve my winstreak on A20 heart runs. I love deckbuilders and I LOVE a challenge. When I picked up the game a lot of negative reviews said it was too hard which only made me want to play it more, but I want to try and articulate why people might think it's "too hard" because that's actually something I feel is a core issue in the game's design.
To me, a better comparison for this game to other deckbuilders is Monster Train, primarily because of how it offers decisions to the players. You have diverging paths which give you two different sets of options, and then they reconnect for you to experience a new battle with your presumably improved deck. I believe that in Monster Train, they made this decision space sufficient for you to feel that your runs are winnable. If you lose, you can still look back on your run and consider what decisions you could have made differently and how they may or may not have changed the outcome. I do not believe Wildfrost provides you with a decision space where that is true (or where it at least feels true). There are a lot of reasons why I think this is the case.
The biggest is that you don't have a persistent HP stat between battles in Wildfrost, each battle is independent. The problem is this means you can't have a bad matchup. In StS or Monster Train you can accept some losses in a battle that you know is bad for the way your deck is built as long as you make up for it in other battles. However, in Wildfrost each battle is won or lost based on whether you can keep your champion alive. Sometimes this leads to interesting in-battle decisions, but more often it leaves you feeling like you find the tools to answer the wide range of upcoming battles or you don't, and when you don't there's very little you could have done differently.
The second is the randomly generated champions. It's an interesting mechanic on the surface, but in games with as much RNG as a deckbuilder it's important to understand your constants. An option like your champion or your class gives you a foundation that you can build on. While randomizing the champion does offer novelty, it means that your only constant is the underwhelming starter deck of your chosen tribe.
To win, you would want to improve upon that deck. However, actually accomplishing this is an issue in terms of the card design itself. So many of the cards are fundamentally reliant on certain synergies to be effective. It's possible (even likely) that when you choose a companion or item from 3 or 4 options, all of your options will only be good given the proper synergies, whether that's having the appropriate cards already in your deck, finding the right charms, or hoping to find the synergy later. If you find perfect synergies, you can trivialize fights. If you find just enough synergy that's great and you can succeed with good play (these are the most interesting runs). However, if you find none or have to make decisions in the hope that things come together, you're left with a deck that is fundamentally ill-equipped for the upcoming challenges. Synergy is fun, but part of what makes high-level play in a game like StS work is understanding when to make decisions that help you scale your deck's capabilities, and when to make decisions that help you create a more well-rounded deck with answers to a variety of challenges. In Wildfrost, it's very rare to get the right resources to create a "well-rounded" deck because so many of the cards and charms are so conditional, and you as the player have such a limited number of decisions that you even get to make over the course of a run to begin with.
There are still things I like about the game. The art style is very fun and a lot of the mechanics are novel enough to make the game a unique experience. I did enjoy playing the game for a while. I lost some early runs because I wasn't paying enough attention to the state of the field. There are a lot of little details to keep track of, which personally I enjoyed. It made learning combat a lot more interesting.
If you're still here after reading my unnecessarily long review I think I'd summarize by saying I enjoyed learning the game, but once I learned the game I just felt frustrated by so many design decisions. If you're not interested in sinking a ton of time into improving your play, you might enjoy learning the game as well and that might be enough for you to feel like the game was a worth playing. However, if you're like me and you want a deckbuilder where once you understand the game you can really start to dive into its nuances, you might find Wildfrost harder to come back to.