There isn’t much of a story in Roguebook (Abrakam Entertainment). You play as two of four characters who’ve been trapped in a magical book and must earn enough ink through card-based combat to paint a path to each chapter’s boss. But as it turns out, this deck-building rogue-like’s cards, co-designed by Richard Garfield of Magic: The Gathering fame, ensure that the story is full of endless possibilities. In this, the game is very much on the same page—pun intended—as similar titles like Slay the Spire and Monster Train. But Roguebook stands apart for the freedom it offers to modify cards and explore the sentient book that’s holding you prisoner (via a grid-based map, a la Heroes of Might and Magic).
Thematically, the deck that you build feels as if it’s very much telling a story, especially since the cards you win can be enhanced by gems and artifacts along the way. And though you’re always visiting the same three areas in each chapter—forest, sky, and volcano—what you encounter and how you overcome it will change drastically depending on the composition of your deck. This, in turn, is heavily influenced by your choice of party members, as you can only pick two of the four unlockable characters at a time. Seifer, a masochistic werewolf, pairs well with Aurora, a tea-drinking tortoise, since the former fills a card-enhancing rage-meter as he takes damage, whereas the latter is super fragile but can help heal her partner.
Roguebook doubles down on this tag-team approach, with every mechanic serving two purposes. As your deck grows in size, the party learns new skills, but it also becomes harder to draw the cards you need. Block cards are shuffled into your hand from both heroes’ decks and reduce damage, but play them wisely because that’ll also move that character to the front, where they will be vulnerable to enemy attacks. You can make cards less expensive to play by imbuing them with attributes, but only if you properly position your party. If you want to escape the tome that is your prison, you’ll need to balance your deck, but it’s often just as much fun to zanily experiment, filling in the blanks like a Mad Libs just to see what happens.
Stonefly (Flight School Studio) opens as Annika, a brilliant young engineer, takes her father’s secret robot out for a spin and winds up getting it stolen. Ashamed, she runs away to track it down and along the way forges ties with a bunch of hungry, scrappy would-be pilots like herself. Stonefly soars when it focuses on the freedom that Annika discovers in piloting her six-legged robotic insect across a marvelous, miniaturized world of rocks, leaves, and branches. The game’s dreamy aesthetic elevates things further by using a crosshatch-heavy rotoscoping that places Annika somewhere between reality and fantasy.
Alas, the game’s joyous sense of exploration and invention is bogged down by tedious grunt work. Annika has a brilliant mind, and as she bumps into new enemies, she comes up with clever ways to deal with them: a sticky goo with which to trap the charging Engine Grubs, a carapace-cleansing water bubble to repel Hook Wasps, a shiny Decoy bauble to distract overly aggressive beetles. But instead of skipping straight to the part where Annika builds the upgrades, Stonefly makes you laboriously replay earlier levels to harvest the resources for them. Combat becomes increasingly complex, which reflects how Annika is growing up, but mining always comes down to you hovering over minerals and hoovering them up.
Stonefly is at its best when it allows players to be as inventive as Annika, whether that’s figuring out how to dispatch a terrifying new type of insect, like a Wind Mantis, or where to go within each of the game’s dreamy biomes. Even harvesting is elevated by your first run-in with an Alpha Aphid, an insect so massive that you can cling to its back as it races through the air, allowing you to gather minerals embedded in its chitin each time it slows down. Sadly, the game blunts such flights of creativity through repetition, and as the gameplay turns into rote drudgery, Annika starts to feel as stuck and world-weary as her father.
In Labyrinth City: Pierre the Maze Detective (Darjeeling), your titular hero’s sworn enemy, Mr. X, has stolen the Maze Stone, which allows him to turn every environment in Opera City into a maze. Chasing Mr. X is difficult, but it’s consistently a joy to get lost in the blind alleys, dead ends, and roundabouts created by the Maze Stone, and in no small part because they’ve been so lovingly recreated from Kamigaki Hiro’s hand-drawn book of the same name.
On the page, each area of Opera City was lavishly illustrated and crammed full of intriguing figures and impossible architectures. Adding animations and dialogue to the mix, such that a giraffe can peek out of a sunroof and an unfinished statue can explain that it ran away because it hated being hit with a chisel, only enhances that sense of wonder. And the path you’re on will always take you somewhere special, whether that’s to a collectible item, comic quip (“We can’t tell you where he is because we’ve taken a vow of silence”), or any number of pop-cultural references ranging from Where’s Waldo? to Metal Gear.
Labyrinth City’s narrator has a propensity for hype, exuberantly explaining early on how “the straightest line isn’t always the path from A to B,” and she’s not wrong. Purple arrows helpfully point the way, and wizards conjure up signposts when asked, but it’s more fun ignoring them and getting lost in the illustrations. Kamigaki has a fine imagination for finding mazes in everyday places and situations, such as a crowded street fair or the piers of a dock, and that’s before the game takes a fantastic turn into lost villages carved into the trunks of massive trees and a haunted manor that keeps shifting its path behind you. There’s only one misstep, late in the game, with the addition of switches that open a path for a limited amount of time, because why would anyone want to rush through Labyrinth City’s world?
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