Racine feels like a quirky little deck-building game that may just upend the conventions of its genre. Simply describing this upcoming card game as a roguelike or deck-building title doesn’t feel really adequate, even if the game did take ample inspiration from card games like Slay the Spir🍬e, Griftlands, and even Dominion. Instead, the deck-building aspect of the game serves to accentuate the game’s incredibly fast-paced combat, rather than it being the meat of Racine itself. You’re here to draw out the right cards in the most strategic manner, which could mean picking the right cards out as much and as quickly as you can, before you are unceremoniously bludgeoned to death by a bunch of corrupted spirits.
In fact, Racine is more like a purposeful, deliberate dance between you and your enemies. The rules of Racine—a word that refers to the roots of a tree—is deceptively straightforward: choose cards that will help you turn the tid🌸e of a series of battles. In these games, combat is typically slower-paced, but Racine turns this on its head by automating these encounters. That means that combat takes place in real-time, which adds a bit more fire to these battles.
At the same time, your action points—or otherwise known as ‘ki’ in the game—will gradually increase the longer you stay in the fight. Will you play the ‘armor +1&rsqu▨o; card now, or conserve your ‘ki’ to play some other card later? Given that effects from these cards are carried over to the next encounter, you may be tempted to keep using cards as and when they materialise in your hand—but that may not be the most sustainable strategy to last throughout the stage, which has at least about 30 encounters you have to trudge through. This journ💙ey is exacerbated by the enemies’ increasing level with every encounter you complete. The hero is reliant on your deck to become stronger, but your enemies will also become stronger alongside you.
All these details can build up to surprisingly tense encounters. More than just compressing the time between your deck-building manoeuvres and the split-second decision-making of choosing which cards to play for your round, Racine is also about finding a comfortable pulse in your encounters, as you anticipate your enemy’s attacks and decide when is the best time to actually play your cards. There are many little twists and turns🧸 abound; if you play your card right before the spirits slam their angry fists against you, you can get a temporary shield against their attack. Or use your cards frequently enough, and you can add to an energy meter that will allow you to unleash a powerful attack when full. There are even wandering merchants who o🦩ffer to aid your journey with some trinkets—some good, others remarkably shitty—in hopes of easing your quest. Making the game more eye-catching is that the environments are meticulously rendered in emerald green hues, with foes posturing in achingly beautiful and fluid pixel animations.
So imagine my surprise when I realise that this isn’t all there is to Racine—the version I’m playing is merely a demo, a work-in-progress “made with very little means🅘”. The full game will probably only be released on itch.io and Steam whenever the developer is ready, but deck-building fans really shouldn’t sit this one out. .