Roguelike deck builders need to do something very special to stand out these days. Cobalt Core, Wild Frost, General Showdown (if you squint your eyes). Everything is excellent, but thanks to the clever gimmicks and the large amount of Chatspa dosage, the Psychomancer stands out on top of them too. It is on the strap line, you know the trade, but to emphasize: you can reroll any number of your screen.
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Your health, enemy health, attack, block, buff, mana, money – all fair games. Numbers of encounters. About the artifacts. ’em has it! Heck, that’s before you started running in the rulebook.
By requiring that each reroll requires the use of a particular card or relic that is charged between encounters, you cannot reroll very enthusiastically, but still, you will reroll quite enthusiastically. The touch of the design applies enough brakes to make it boring. A sewer rat swinging the pipe in front of you will, for example, split its health rod into chunks, so you can’t keep everything apart in one shot. You can permanently change the cards and draw 20 cards instead of 2, for example, but playing them will chase you on the map between encounters and spell Doom in roughly the same style as the FTL Rebel Fleet. One die relic that moves the reroll will scale to D20 during execution if it can be upgraded consistently.
Pipe-wielding sewer rats represent the mischievous chaos that Shicomancers encompass on more or less all levels. From dating art to crude picture styles for children to fishing mini-games waiting at the end of a successful run (with no effect except for the fish counter on the main menu). It’s a luxurious, playful environment where multiverse shenanigans leave their room for stupid jokes, including the relics of hitchhiker guides that will keep you from panic.
It’s all so lively, thanks to the animation, it shows you jazzing up a lot of cards, showing your hands firing a pipe gun at the surface of the geese on the other side, or turning the crank with a magically simulated organ gun. With malicious ock cards, simply swing your finger at the enemy and deals boncar damage to each keyword on every card remaining in your hand. One mark for a good deck builder is how many cards stop and go “Wait, what?” You can turn every copy of a number to zero! I can effectively get endless mana! I can use all the cards in my hands! (As long as I have 13 of them and they all have different names!) I can play a very angry frog!
But such a wild possibility does not make it seem like it – you still have to consider early in the run before making something broken. It has the clever complexity of chewing, and goes beyond simple energy costs to deepen the puzzles presented by any hand. The core complication is colored mana. All cards require proper colored mana to be played. This is obtained by discarding cards of that color. I dance a bit every time the game demands that it spend the possibilities as currency. Here, it forms a compelling card backbone without the ability to reorganize anything.
It’s a good old blend of true ideas that have been tried, blended into something refreshing and new. (Indeed, Rogue Lords has already tried the whole thing about UI hacking, but there it felt like a fallback, not a constant consideration). Class selection includes whiff from Monster Train fact. This is built from a combination of coloured orbs at the start of each run, but these decks blend more themes than cards. The Green Orb revolves around summoning a kind spirit, but combining it with the Blue Orb, you are the builder and build a Da Vinci steam tank and a Dyson sphere.
Beyond cards, the class has the ability to display the entire game in a different way. You may see luck at first. All rolls allow you to roll multiple dices to get the best results as a straight buff. But then you remember that sometimes low numbers are good numbers. I hated the wild guys class until you realized they were effectively immortal as long as you just kept re-rolling their special injuries buffers and abolishing each turn. Even with one run I intentionally downgraded Die to D4, reduced the horrible numbers to harmless Widdle’s baby numbers, laughing every time.
The point is that beyond the novelty, you’re in the overwhelming nonsense that makes you feel dead and clever, as if you’re finding a hack, as if the developer is cheating on yourself thinking it’s been overlooked. Imagine canily rerolling the Spire artifact and tripling its damage, or buff count, or activating it by 10 times, not two. Once you find a place to make an effective cut with one dice pell, it becomes a devastating and flexible tool. And if you play enough run to pour as many points as you want into the Perma Upgrade Tree, you can crack the rulebook and draw 20 cards. It’s stupid, over-boundary lines, but it works.
The price is longevity. With all the runs, it doesn’t take long for an absolutely devastating combo to bag. Spirelan’s rare, exquisite killing will allow you to see you become infinite and draw enough cards, while generating enough energy to infinitely stop the poor Schmack you are facing. With Diseomancer you can do that in almost any run. All hands are puzzles. Enjoy it for a while, go fishing and start anew until the puzzle becomes more powerful than it is.
Or leave it there! It took me about 12 hours to reach the top of that upgrade tree. At that point, I saw everything and broke the game in dozens of different ways. For many, it becomes a wise stopping point. There are current traditional 20 ascension ranks, but the challenges they present don’t escalate quickly enough to make the basic difficulty relatively easy once you find a few tricks. What’s more, honing your optimal strategy is really not important. SICEOMANCER is not a pit that disappears for hundreds of hours. It is a neat cave where you dive into to see the milk stones.
“Hack the Rules” is an ambition I admire, and the execution of Diseomancer is pristine enough to throw me a bit into whoop. If you look into any section, you’ll find smart and interesting things happening. One of the card art is a hint of death hat. One encounter will lead to participants in the loss avoidance study. s’gold.
Larger power will reduce the chances of regeneration, but that’s fine. SICEOMANCER is here for a good time, not a long time. It’s part of what you’re worth.