Draft of Darkness Reviews

Draft of Darkness has a killer concept – what if Slay the Spire and Resident Evil had a grotesque mutant baby? It’s a shame then that it seems to have slipped under the radar, as it’s an extremely strong realisation of that idea, especially considering this is the work of one dude. In terms of looks and atmosphere it’s pretty spot on to that PS1 era of survival horror, and if you find the default filters a bit too much there’s plenty of customisation options to get it to your particular optimum level of grunginess. Draft of Darkness is essentially a dungeon crawler roguelike deckbuilder, with a heavy emphasis on resource management to lean into the survival horror theme. You explore top-down dungeons, and fight enemies in turn-based combat (well sort of, it’s basically ATB from Final Fantasy), and defeated enemies drop more cards to improve your deck. The survival horror twist is that nearly all cards/attacks require limited resources to be used, though most will also have a much weaker, non-resource using alternate mode to be used on lesser enemies or as finishers on stronger ones. There’s a number of unlockable playable characters, and there’s admirable diversity between them, with each having a particular way of using and conserving resources. Pavel for example, can sacrifice health for energy to power his darkness moves. Freya uses a crossbow, and can retrieve some of her ammo as long as the enemy dies quickly enough. Rene has a chainsaw which takes three fuel just to turn on, with one fuel being expended per move at least. It absolutely rips through fuel, but does have the advantage of spectacular DPS so he can tear through stronger enemies, but has to be cautious when fighting regular foes, relying on those weak alternative moves. You can also recruit two extra party members which can help round out the party, though unsurprisingly a healer does end up feeling quite mandatory. It all ends up working very well, and there’s plenty to see and unlock here, especially for the frankly bargain price of 12 quid. There’s plenty of enemy and boss variety, and even after 50 hours I’m still finding events and items I’ve never seen before. Runs do take a while, and you can expect a successful one to take you about 3 hours (it might take you a few goes, as there’s a steep learning curve). There’s definitely some power differences between characters and cards, but most runs you should be able to cobble something together. There are some issues that prevent Draft of Darkness being an unqualified recommendation. The developer is not a native English speaker, and while I don’t think it impacts the core playability (I did not struggle with ambiguity in card effects), the story and dialogue are clunky and amateurish in that particular “English as a secondary language” sort of way. The story manages to be both boilerplate and opaque simultaneously, and I found myself drifting off during endless exposition about a poorly defined darkness enveloping the world. It was very hard to get an idea of what had happened, what the impact on the world is and even a proper idea of the antagonists. I found it easy to ignore as ultimately I don’t play roguelike dungeoncrawlers for the plot, but if for some reason you do you may find yourself disappointed. Dodgy script aside (and as a fan of RE I can’t in good conscience automatically condemn a game for poor writing), this is still an easy recommend to anyone who is into deckbuilders and horror games – as far as I’m aware it’s a unique pairing, and one that has had a huge amount of time and love put into it.