Slay The Spire — Take Off Your Crown, We Have a New Favorite! Review of Domestic Knock on the Coffin Lid
Combining a role-playing game with a “card roguelike” is not an easy task. Especially in times when “roguelikes” are churned out according to the principle of “two thousand units ready, another million on the way”. We live in a world in which an army of Slay the Spire clones is ready to act against an army of Vampire Survivors clones, and it seems that there is no hope. The common people were waiting for a savior, and he came. And “Knock on the Coffin Lid” from the Russian studio RedBoon thundered!
Plot in a roguelike? Give me three
The story campaign tells us about the fate of three heroes “living” in a world torn apart by internal and external conflicts.
Fantastic beasts, such as only the earth can produce, are in a never-ending race for survival. Here, people eat people and pray to either demons or gods, a mad alchemist “will refuse nothing” and advises a traveler to “make himself at home”, and blood is paid for almost more readily than gold. While elves and dwarves wage war, godlike entities use mortals as pawns in their chess game.
Percival, Bjorn and Vanadis – “former” mortals who drank poisoned wine, by the will of the mysterious Mortis become not the last figures on this chessboard. Mortis resurrects the heroes to direct their personal motives to fulfill their own aspirations, but the outcome of events has not yet been determined – what the end of the story will be depends on the decisions you make.
The game is extremely beginner-friendly – it’s hard to break your teeth on this roguelike, well… unless you rush straight into the maximum difficulty level. And yes, you heard right – this is a roguelike with a full-fledged campaign, which has a choice of difficulty levels. Also, the plot completely lacks random event generation, which allows you to comfortably “enter the game”, even if this is your first time. However, hardcore fans will also be welcome here, but more on that later.
The campaign map is vast and doesn’t restrict you to a limited choice – you’re free to go almost anywhere your eyes take you. Battles, rest camps, merchants and events are all in their place. It’s the events that make this game stand out from the clone army.
Every encounter here is truly an “event” that complements your picture of the world: a girl is tied to a pole and they want to sacrifice her; Kratos is walking his son and does not want to get involved in the conflict; people are turning into “white walkers”, and the local inquisition is going to burn them; bandits have thrown an accomplice, and you decide – to finish him off, catch up with the swindlers or cure the poor guy and take him with you?
There are dozens of such choices to be made, and each one has consequences, both immediate and long-term. In addition, each protagonist has a backstory behind them, which determines the possible developments. For example, Bjorn dreamed of becoming a druid, but failed the test and suffers from the curse of lycanthropy. Because of this, he became an outcast among the elves. This is why he hates the two-faced elven race and is not too eager to cooperate productively with them.
“Collected a powerful build? Collected. But at what cost?” – this is what you sometimes think when you come to the final battle and understand that you are strong, but you have done such “things” that it will not end well.
However, due to the lack of “randomness” on the map, after a few hours the events cease to be a surprise, and the dialogues increasingly lead to frustration – there is no “skip” button so as not to wait for the end of the dialogue, which you have already seen for the tenth (damn!) time. The refusal of random generation in the campaign is entirely explained by the tasks that are set before the hero, but a slightly more comfortable “skip” of memorized content would only benefit the overall dynamics.
The world is a patchwork of images gleaned from here and there, and most importantly, these images fit harmoniously into the overall picture. The game’s narrative does not claim the laurels of “A Song of Ice and Fire,” but it does a good job of giving the world the necessary depth and adding an extra layer of interest. At first, you are driven forward by the desire to find out what is happening in this world, and then the game mechanics take over.
The Wolf, the Huntress and the Two-Meter Wardrobe
The gameplay is based on the classic formula: we travel to points of interest on the map, participate in battles and events, get new cards and gradually turn the starting deck into a deadly weapon of mass destruction.
Deck building may seem primitive at first, but it is unlikely to disappoint anyone except a couple of fans of calculating the efficiency of the build on the calculator – the game has more than 1300 “cardboard” and 12 classes, divided between three protagonists. Moreover, all this can be additionally seasoned with the help of equipment – it is impossible to count the number of possible combinations! Although, those two with a calculator will definitely cope.
The protagonist’s “body” can be equipped with up to eight pieces of equipment. Among them: a standard set of helmet, armor, gloves and boots; two-handed or two one-handed weapons; decoration and talisman. Each item has its own set of characteristics, and can also give various effects or cards to the deck, both positive and negative. Some items are combined into set sets (oil oil) and are capable of giving such powerful effects that you have to take them into account when choosing cards for the deck.
It’s fun to tinker with, but you inevitably run into balance issues. Most cards and gear are obtained randomly, which means your desired build won’t be as effective if you don’t get the right card or gear. However, it’s worth giving credit where credit is due – the impact of “randomness” on the outcome is probably minimal compared to similar games, and the class system is worthy of special praise.
The class system in the game is simple and complex, at the same time: each of the three protagonists is represented by four classes, which are opened sequentially, and no less sequentially prepare the player to get to know themselves.
Percival opens the campaign with the Stout class, a classic warrior with easy-to-implement defensive and offensive cards. It’s very similar to the Ironclad from Slay the Spire, and is a perfect candidate for learning the basic mechanics.
Subsequently, by participating in races, we level up and gain access to other classes: “Gold Digger”, “Knight”, “Veteran”. Classes have their own set of unique cards that complement the standard deck, and a passive effect that should be taken into account when choosing equipment and building a deck. In addition, each class offers its own mechanics that add variety to the gameplay. For example, the “Knight” can spare an enemy who is on his last legs and take him as a partner.
After completing Percival’s playthrough, we gain access to Bjorn and his classes: Werewolf, Lost, Druid of the Moons, and Madman. Bjorn spends his own health to play cards, which takes the need for proper deck management to a new level, as the boy can turn into a werewolf, and his classes represent the stages of his curse.
Vanadis’ classes: Boar Tamer, Fox Disciple, Raven Sister, and Honey Badger Companion are based on summoning the appropriate creatures and require even more careful deck control. The cards in the Vanadis deck are double-sided, and which effect will work depends on the presence or absence of a pet.
As a result, the developers came up with a class system built in such a way that progress within the character classes develops the mechanics “in breadth,” and the transition to a new hero encourages you to take a step “in depth” in understanding the mechanics, which gives a feeling of constant, unceasing development of both the gameplay and the player.
Hardcore Present and Future
For those who find the story campaign not enough, there is a tab called “Challenges”. At the time of writing, the challenges are represented by only one mode, “Tree of Ascensions”. This is a classic mode with random map generation and “ascensions”, when additional penalties are imposed on the player, making the passage more difficult.
Unlike the story mode, trials do not have a difficulty level selection, and the first “ascension” levels are much easier than the story campaign on the highest difficulty.
Moreover, it is the “ascension tree” that you should go to first if you intend to try to complete the campaign at the maximum difficulty level – for completing the tree, the heroes receive bonuses that are valid in the story mode. It’s just a pity that the developers do not inform about this at the beginning of the game – I think I am not the only one who reduced the difficulty in the story campaign, because I did not even know about the possibility of getting some kind of boosts for the characters in the “trials”.
The developers continue to develop the game, and over time the “Challenges” tab will be replenished with “daily challenges” and “custom game”, where you can manually select modifiers for the run, as well as the “Nightmares of Millenis” add-on, which will tell new stories within the plot and offer a new game mode with a rating table.
If you are interested in the project, but the price tag of 999 rubles seems high, then a demo version is available on Steam , within which you can completely complete the story campaign for Percival.
Diagnosis
Combining a role-playing game with a card roguelike is a difficult task, but the developers from the domestic studio RedBoon coped with it almost flawlessly. For me, KOTCL has become the very game that you launch for half an hour in the evening, and exit it in the morning with red eyes. In the technical part, the project needs a little polishing, and there is no Russian voice acting – for me, this is not a minus and did not interfere with getting genuine pleasure from the game from the very first minutes of acquaintance.
The attractive visual style, woven from Slavic and southern European motifs, and the melancholic soundtrack immerse you in the atmosphere of an adventure through a world in which bright sadness and chthonic horror are two parts of a whole. I experienced similar feelings when I played Baldur’s Gate 3 exactly one year ago.
If you’re just planning to join the roguelike genre, this is a good entry point. Knock on the Coffin Lid gave me exactly what I wanted from a Slay the Spire sequel – a full-fledged story campaign and development of mechanics aimed at their diversity, not complexity. I’ll take the liberty of saying that RedBoon has done for roguelikes what Supergiant Games once did for action roguelikes with Hades. This is a big step towards popularizing the genre, but the studio’s resources are obviously not enough to attract the attention of a wider audience.
I hope this is just the beginning of a long journey and one day the day will come when Knock on the Coffin Lid will finally “destroy the spire”. But for now, if I were the developers of Slay the Spire 2, I would be tense – we need to surprise, otherwise they will hear the “knock” too.
Pro
- Low entry threshold
- A unique mix of genres
- Developed class system
- A string of references and funny moments
- A simple but interesting story
Contra
- Lacks QoL improvements (skipping dialogues, for example)
- There are inaccuracies in the description of the cards
- No Russian voice acting (if that’s a minus for you)
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All images in this material are copyrighted by RedBoon
