Demon’s Mirror is a roguelike that tries to offer some extra depth by blending two fairly different genres, the card battler and match-3 games. This playable build gave us vibes that weren’t without recalling Dicefolk, another ingenious game that combined familiar mechanics in original and exciting ways. The content available wasn’t that extensive, but it was more than enough to showcase the tactical depth and sheer fun of these strategic battles.
Cards and Jewels
The adventure begins as you select your starting character, but in this version we were limited to Draga, a humanoid dragon with horns. Each character comes with a unique ability and the promise of additional modifiers, the latter being locked for now. Then we’re off to the region map, a forest one in this case, with many tiles to forge our path in a way that there is no turning back, planning the route ahead anticipating the battles, campfires (for healing), shop visits, and random events, until we reach the inevitable stage boss.
Gameplay is a weird concoction of gem chaining puzzle games and card battlers, and despite the initial suspicion over the combination of these mechanics, it isn’t difficult to grasp. You have the familiar action points per round to spend in card usage, but you can instead choose to chain at least three tiles on the grid for other effects. From damage to shield, activating your special ability or amassing essence to upgrade some cards, tactical options are extensive enough as to make you carefully consider your approach and deeply regret wasting your precious action points in a move that wasn’t fruitful.
Every so often, your opponents may deploy an enemy tile on the board which can do one of several actions, from damaging to debuffing or even shielding an enemy. The number of turns in which it will trigger are shown, along with their potency or damage they cause, and the only ways to avoid it is by playing a card that targets tiles, or chaining it with other tiles to reduce its potency. This enemy action will move our focus from the deck and into the board, meaning that players have to balance the pros and cons of letting the tile trigger or do their best effort to neutralize it.
Demon’s Mirror promises a selection of over 200 cards, which combined with the upgrade potential should provide vast combinations to create a consistent run. Our runs did showcase a few different scenarios based on the paths we took, complete with the variables that you will find along the way, random events being a fun change of pace throwing some lore at you, often with surprising and relevant consequences, either positive or negative.
With the card and grid mix, Demon’s Mirror has a clever idea up its sleeve. The rest of the gameplay mechanics are more familiar but well-rounded, with items that we can use whenever we want to (and occasionally we can purchase additional slots), trinkets to buff your hero, action warnings over each opponent allowing us to plan our moves ahead, and an intuitive interface.
Unchained Replayability
Demon’s Mirror is the kind of game that puts a spin to a known formula, while fundamentally retaining what makes the genre so appealing and challenging. There are enough Slay the Spire and Puzzle Quest influences here to catch one’s attention, and while it’s not bound to be a groundbreaking or hugely popular release, the potential to scratch the itch of fans from both sides of the barricade – match-3 and deck builder – is there. We’ll see how far it can go when it releases sometime later this year.
MP1st was given access to a preview build of Demon’s Mirror for our hands-on session. Demon’s Mirror is launching for PC in 2024.