A Long Way Down

I wanted to like this game, but it is very lackluster, grindy, and repetitive. thank the lord its achievements were easy to accomplish so I may never touch this game again. BTW the resurrection Idol needed to complete the potion achievement is in a chest on chapter 2 level 1.

The characters are kinda interesting, but the game is not very interesting or innovative. Ultimately the cards are just not to imaginative and the tile building mechanic kills any momentum the story would build. Anti-cathartic.

A Long Way Down, a game déjà vu with Hand of Fate, Darkest Dungeon, and Slay the Spire, merges RPG bits into a decent rogue-lite smoothie. Deck-building is the main deal—grab cards, build a killer hand. My deck stayed put; why fix what ain't broke? Upgrade the sword, go legendary, slay monsters. The twist? Dungeon Master messes with your cards, making it chess with a devious mummy. Companions? More like background noise. Rogue-lite? Death's an upgrade ticket, feels earned but cheap. Story's Sam, a time-traveling slave. Wild but surface-level. Audio and visuals? Good-looking but a limited playlist. Value? Early access is lean; price is spicy. Bugs? Bug circus. Performance? Easy on the eyes. A Long Way Down: potential-packed, but the price tag's a hard call. Maybe on sale, support the devs, see where the journey leads. Cheers!

A mission based, deck builder, with random maps that must be modified by placing tiles to get through. That is it’s main hook, with you needing to build paths, destroy walls and rotate tiles to move between sections of the map. On the campaign maps, you will find campfires (healing), chests, creatures and other things which you can try and interact with or just avoid. Your tiles are limited so you usually can’t go everywhere. Complicating matters is a dungeon master that will steal your tiles and play them on the map, blocking your path or allowing creatures to get to you. Battles are vanilla deck builder card battles, bringing nothing to the table, and in fact not matching even the weaker card games. There are some items and a party system which tries to add some interesting twists, but they really didn’t add much. Each map also has win objectives and side objectives, which are typical things like kill a certain creature, open a chest, etc. There is also another mode (The Pit) which strips away the story and is more roguelike but I didn’t play this mode. The positive is the uniqueness of the campaign map interactions. It is a pretty cool concept, but it’s not enough to h…

Just not it, game is clunky even in the tutorial and doesn't show any evident depth to its mechanics - plus you can fail out of the tutorial because the AI plays your map tiles for you? Awful.

4 hours in. It's addictive. I like the progression. There are puzzles, which you can ignore if you want, but there are quest rewards for beating them. I like replaying the boards. I like improving my character. I like this game.