Griftlands is a deck building game set on a cutthroat alien planet where conflict requires either a sharp dagger or a sharper joke. Your survival tools are shuffled into decks of cards that grow and evolve as the adventure progresses. Klei Entertainment’s Card Battler sounds similar to games like Slay the Spire, but the differentiator is an interconnected world full of characters and factions where your actions and relationships actually matter. Griftlands presents a largely satisfactory narrative while scratching my itch for complex deck building roguelikes.
Most of the action in Griftlands revolves around flipping cards during heated negotiations and battles. However, the combat and negotiation systems both have custom decks and mechanics. Battles are direct physical battles in which you use attack, defense and reinforcement cards to defeat the opposing force. These augmentation cards can do anything to inflict damage over time to increase the power of other attacks, and they do an excellent job of adding strategic depth to the action. Sensitive enemies and allies have panic points and surrender as soon as their health drops below a certain threshold. This clever system offers you a powerful and fascinating choice to spare or execute your enemies, even though accidents do happen and people can die regardless of your intentions. Killing an enemy rewards you with cards to add to your deck, but their deaths alert the public to your violent pension and can turn a victim’s friend into an enemy. I enjoyed maintaining the delicate balance of keeping enemies alive while sending their cohorts to keep my character’s standing in the world as pristine as possible. Adding this combat puzzle to encounters wonderfully expands the capacity to act to a system that can easily be reduced to killing or being killed, and helped add extra stakes to each encounter.
Negotiations, on the other hand, are my favorite part of the game. I love to see my conversations represented by game mechanics rather than the typical dialog tree. I also appreciate being able to cope with conflicts without always resorting to violent tactics. These debates are triggered when you’re trying to get information, claim a few more schills for a completed job, or demoralize an opponent before a real fight. Your goal is to reduce the resolve of your opponent’s core argument. Side arguments have various effects on the discussion, in that they provide advantages for themselves or hinder the opponent. These additional arguments stand apart from your core argument and must be defended as if they were allies in combat. Failing a negotiation does not end the game, so negotiation is a complex, fun, and low-risk solution to some problems. Losing a negotiation can lead to a physical confrontation, but talking through it can avoid some confrontations or give buffs in street fights, so is it’s usually worth a try. I found it a little overwhelming to learn a second set of card mechanics at first, but ultimately found the taste and execution of the negotiation system to be excellent.
Griftlands’ three distinct campaigns are packed with meaningful content, each with a unique character set in different areas of the harsh continent of Havaria. Sal seeks revenge on someone who sold her as a temporary worker in Murder Bay. Rook is a former military agent who specializes in espionage and handles both sides of the conflict at Grout Bog – just like he handles his token lucky coin. Smith, the black sheep of a wealthy family, aims to seek an inheritance never promised by building his fame despite his level-headed personality. All three stories feel very different but together paint a great picture of the factions, people and struggles that hold the world together. Sal’s narrative feels more urgent and gritty than the others, while Smith’s story is airier and you can enjoy playing a selfish idiot. It is a pleasure to learn their different fighting and negotiating styles. The entire cast is fun to control, and everyone uses tactics that suit their personalities. For example, Smith uses his notoriety to do the heavy lifting in negotiations, while his fighting style is a mix of heavy drinking and self-harming pro-wrestling moves. An absolute highlight of my time in the Griftlands was discovering ways to take advantage of Rook’s reliance on coin toss manipulation and create devastating negotiation combinations.
The beats of the main story stay the same from one run to the next, but the jobs you take on each day and the decisions you make along the way create a new adventure every time. You can end up on the other side of the final conflict or face allies you became friends with earlier in the run. These decisions make every run through Griftlands worthwhile and help sell the procedurally generated story moments. All of the Havarias mentioned have their own factions, locations, and styles of negotiation and fighting. If you’re in their good position, they might even step in and help you out with a conflict. I spent a couple of shillings one night snapping a drink with a character and then they saved my butt the next day when I got caught in a jam. Making friends along the way is important, and it’s hard to survive without a few by your side. This leads to a small gripe: there aren’t many reasons why characters don’t like you. In a game where morals and relationships are at the center of your interactions with a harsh, dangerous world, the fact that you cannot use negative emotions to your advantage feels like a missed opportunity to me.
Griftlands is an ambitious package. Not only does it combine two different compelling deck building systems into one game, but trying to build relationships feels like a little version of what I loved about Mass Effect. The best thing is, it takes it off. Griftlands uses the strengths of map-based roguelikes and offers a different experience with every adventure, offers different deck archetypes for every playable character and every game day brings new goals to keep the experience fresh. The Griftlands may be an unforgiving, harsh place to live, but it’s a world I would love to keep visiting.
