Hellcard is a cooperative roguelike card game developed by Thing Trunk and published by Skystone and Surefire Games. In it, you control a band of unnamed heroes on a mission to save the world after it has been corrupted by an archdemon. To defeat monsters spawned by the corruption, your heroes will have to explore several dungeons to fight different enemies. The game comes with three modes – a singleplayer mode, a co-op multiplayer mode, and an endless mode – and three starting classes to choose from: warrior, rogue, and mage.

Hellcard is one of the games in Thing Trunk’s Return 2 Games series, a series of seven games the studio is hoping to develop as a tribute to classic mid-core games published in the 90s. So far, the team has published two out of seven titles – Hellcard and Book of Demons – and has a third title in active development, called Book of Aliens. Where Book of Demons is heavily inspired by Diablo, Book of Aliens references MicroProse’s UFO: Enemy Unknown.

For players who have spent time playing Thing Trunk’s previous title, the hack-and-slash deckbuilder Book of Demons, there’ll be plenty that will look familiar. For starters, Book of Demons is set in the same world as Hellcard: a 2D world embedded inside an old-school pop-up book. Every character looks like a paper figurine, complete with jagged edges as if they’ve been cut out of paper minutes before. Gameplay-wise, however, Book of Demons feels much more like a dungeon crawler, whereas Hellcard leans much more heavily into its deck-building features. Originally, the development team intended to include Hellcard as a mini-game inside Book of Demons, but changed their minds after getting stuck into development, as it became clear that Hellcard felt more like a standalone title. Thus, Hellcard was born.

For fans of established deck-builder titles like Slay the Spire, Monster Train, and Inscryption, the broad structure of Hellcard will hold no surprises. Similar to the aforementioned titles, Hellcard will have players choose a hero character and class before embarking on a run featuring a number of randomised encounters. A run is symbolised by the number of dungeon floors you complete as you descend further down into the darkness. Each floor consists of eleven encounters, and the final encounter of a floor is always a boss battle of some kind. Combat, in turn, is pretty standard too: you take on enemies by playing cards of different types by using mana; a hero usually has three mana per turn; and when this is used up, no more cards can be played until the mana is replenished during the next turn. Card-wise, Hellcard comes with three overall card types: attack cards, block cards, and influence cards. While attack and block cards both do what it says on the tin, influence cards provide temporary buffs that will last until the end of battle. When used, attack and block cards go in a discard pile, while influence cards are exhausted, meaning they can’t be used again until the next encounter. Additionally, players can also collect artifacts, which give heroes boons that will last for the duration of a particular run. To equip them, players will need gems, a currency that – similar to gold in other deckbuilding titles – can be collected as a reward after completing an encounter.

Much of the nuts and bolts of Hellcard overlap with the general format of deckbuilding games. Where it diverges from the usual formula, however, is its combat map and companion system. Where similar games will have a visual map that your hero’s pawn will move across, Hellcard’s map is made up of two columns, with each row representing an encounter. For each encounter, the game offers up two possible pathways to choose from. Each choice will come with different enemies and rewards. While one choice may consist of fighting zombies with new cards as a reward, another may mean facing off against spiders with card upgrades or artifacts as rewards. Along the way, you can also recruit companions to your party. These allies fight alongside you and come with their own quirks, perks, and skills. Practically, this means they come with their own deck, draw their own hand every turn, and have their own pool of mana, too. This, coupled with the game’s sheer variety and artifacts that can be unlocked, ensures that every run will be unique, and it’s highly unlikely that you’ll encounter the same enemies with the same band of heroes, artifacts, and abilities.

These companion classes are very needed too, as the difficulty in Hellcard can be a bit unpredictable at times. Coupled with the fact that the game’s user interface features some hard-to-read text when it comes to enemy abilities and buffs, this might make for a steep learning curve for newcomers to the deckbuilder genre, and newbies might find it a hard game to crack. That said, however, while Hellcard’s UI can feel a little unwieldy every now and then, its gameplay rarely tips over into being completely frustrating. If you’re not averse to a bit of a learning curve and some perseverance, it’s sure to offer an entertaining challenge for both newcomers and veteran fans of the genre.