It’s just their health is lower, and keeping them alive gives you buffs. The negotiation games feature arguments, but really they’re just characters with their own lifepoints, exactly as they are in the battle deck. In the negotiation games, you are adding ‘Composure’, which is effectively just defence, and ‘Incepting’, which is a fancy name for debuffs. It’s one of Griftlands’ biggest faults, actually: it loves to confuse things by putting wonky names and presentation onto things that should be simple. They may seem like apples and oranges, but they’re mostly re-skins of the same mechanics. You are picking off enemy arguments, before attacking their core argument, which is a convoluted way of saying ‘you’re destroying their defences to get to a main life pool’. Negotiations, meanwhile, look bewildering: they involve two revolving wheels, with arguments hanging off them like Pandora bangles. Physical battles can be 4v4, with allies and enemies in open battle, but with everyone automated aside from your main characters. On the face of it, the two decks and their games are wildly different. They have different health pools, you will have to balance the quality of both decks, and – occasionally – you will get to choose whether the upcoming battle is a chat or fisticuffs. Firefights with enemies means you’re using the battle deck. So, get into a verbal sparring match with a character and your negotiation deck will come out. Rather than have one deck that can handle both battles and negotiations, Griftlands opts to give you two decks, one for each situation. We couldn’t understand why the missions all felt so photocopied, when the dialogue clearly had some much attention lavished on it.Įach mission tends to culminate with a battle or a negotiation, and it’s where Griftlands gets even more ambitious. The same goes for Rook’s missions, where you’re commonly called to enlist people into the Union. You could summarise ninety percent of Sal’s missions as ‘shake down someone who owes us money’ or ‘confront an enemy gang member’.

You can even jump off the critical path to buy cards from innkeepers, or chat to peripheral characters.Īnd while the story and dialogue is strong, the missions themselves don’t change up enough. It adds a sense of mystery too, as you’re never quite sure what your win or loss might mean to the story. Your success means that allies join you, their own story gets a satisfying ending, or your standing with their faction goes up. It’s as well-written as you’d expect from Klei Entertainment, and each match feels like more is on the line than just basic survival.

On the one hand, it feels good to slip into a deck-builder where the story matters. There’s some deviation from run to run – you might choose to take a different path with different missions, while random events do still occur – but the outline and big beats are the same. Sal Ik-Derrick’s story is effectively a bounty hunter one, as you take down a rival hunter, while Rook’s story focuses on corporate espionage, as you help out an old friend who is forming a union against the Storm Baron company. You will pick one of three characters, and they each have a different story, all in a dusty, ramshackle futuristic setting. What Griftlands does is keep the roguelike formula of ‘get as far as you can, die, and be better prepared for the next run’, but then layers a narrative on top. You might get choices to make, mostly as a vehicle for the game to chuck you rewards or battles. The tendency in deck-building is to let the story come through the random events, but you don’t often get an overall plot. The big deviation is that Griftlands is story-focused.

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