A Roguelike Deckbuilder That Bucks Convention, But Buckaroo’d Me Too
As much as I am in thrall to the deckbuilder genre, mindlessly picking up every one that comes out on the Xbox Store, I do wish that they’d change things up more often. Almost all of them rip a pack or two from Magic: The Gathering, using mana (or something like it) to pay for cards that have attack and defence stats. It seems that you’re not a card game if you don’t have poison, bleeds, armour and card-draw, and you’re not a deckbuilder if you don’t have relics, path structures and end of run bosses.
The Royal Writ has some of these things (poison, relics, paths and end of run bosses, if you’re interested), but it also sidesteps some of the most common inclusions. If the roguelike deckbuilder was a family tree, The Royal Writ would be the odd cousin that nobody talks to any more. It breaks convention, and doesn’t feel like anything else that’s roaming around in the space.
Who Am I Fighting, Exactly?
First and foremost, The Royal Writ doesn’t have enemies. I had a moment when playing the tutorial, when I was sure that enemies would turn up at the end, and assumed that the tutorial was unfinished when they didn’t. Instead of demons and vampires, your enemy is entropy. You need to win before your deck erodes into nothing.
It took me a while to grasp this core of The Royal Writ, as I didn’t find the tutorial to be fantastic at making this critical distinction from other games I had played. Cards die permanently. If you lose one in a battle, it’s gone forever. You would be wise not to risk your best cards, and you need to time your actions perfectly.
This is all probably confusing, so I’ll reverse a bit. Each battle in The Royal Writ is lane-based, and you’re adding troops to the left-hand side of your choice of lane. With each turn, the troops move forward a column, and – generally – the columns multiply the strength of the troops as they progress. The further along the lane, the stronger your troops.
A Reversed, Card-Game Version Of Plants Vs Zombies
At the end of the lane is a castle. This is the castle of your enemy, and if a troop reaches it, they hurl themselves against the defences and die. You want to be winning the battle before that happens, because – as previously mentioned – death is permanent. You’re effectively picking up the card and tearing it into pieces. Immediately, you can sense the tension: the further along the lane, the more powerful your cards. The more powerful they are, the closer they are to dying.
The Royal Writ has fun with this simple and effective tension. Individual stops on the lane can have structures and hazards on them. Treasure chests open up to apply permanent buffs to your card (do you risk reaching them?). Bridges and forts confer buffs, but swamps apply debuffs. You can add these structures or remove them, but mostly you are selecting your lane based on where they are.
Balatro fans will feel a sense of familiarity in how you beat the enemy. Your troops either have a base strength in blue, or a multiplier in red. These two multiply to create a total damage, and that’s what you deal to the enemy defences every turn. A strong deck makes sure that there’s always a balance of blue and red troops, as that’s where the big numbers lie.
Saved By A Well-Timed Letter
Helping you out are supporting cards. Item, food and equipment cards are either inclusions in your deck – bought and won from shops and events – or they’re wrung from your character effects, and they act much like spells in your conventional deckbuilder. There are also Letter cards, which are basically freebies given to you every turn, and they offer you a random assortment of point-boosting cards.
Zoom out further, and you have the path and its events. Structurally, The Royal Writ is similar to pretty much every other roguelike deckbuilder, giving you branches to choose from on your way to a boss (it’s almost disappointing that this is so conventional after the leftfield ‘combat’), but at least the events are creative. Cards can be sacrificed for the game’s relics. A giant game-show wheel gives you game-winning (or losing) changes, and you get a fun ‘nudge’ if you don’t like where the needle is heading. Horse races have you betting on when a horse will eventually tumble, and it’s odd.
Writing all of this, I have so much admiration for The Royal Writ. It completely ignores convention and does its own thing. There are scraps of Balatro and Slay the Spire here and there, but mostly this is nothing like any game, whether board, card or video game, that I have ever played.
Abject Permanence
It’s also extraordinarily clever in how it gets you protecting your run. The convention in deckbuilders is for buffs and debuffs to be temporary. But in The Royal Writ, everything is so permanent. If your cards get effects applied, they are there to stay, and that adds so much weight to the decision making. Losing is so much more punishing when it rips up a card from your deck. It’s a philosophy that reminds me of the new wave of legacy board games, like Pandemic Legacy.
But while I have admiration and respect for The Royal Writ, I never achieved a state where I completely enjoyed it. I’ve thrown myself against it for a couple of weeks now, and I can’t love it.
It’s hard to pinpoint why, particularly when so many other players and reviewers seem to have found that love. A lot of it is because the enemy isn’t present. Virtually every action in the game is enacted by the player, rather than an opponent. That has a couple of negative effects for me: it means that runs can feel overly samey, since I am the only one driving change; and it made me realise that I like building decks that anticipate and react to other players’ moves. In The Royal Writ that’s not possible, so I’m just building for power. It’s like playing a hack-and-slash game and only building for DPS. It’s a little one-note.
Another problem is the design. The cards and relics tend to be more situational than I like, effectively only working well if they are surrounded by a specific build. That’s great if you luck into those cards through shops and gifts, but it can mean a muddled deck that lacks synergy if that’s not the case. Even the starting deck has situational ant cards in it.
A Special Game That Invites Respect But Not Obsession
It’s entirely possible that I’m not playing The Royal Writ correctly, or I am missing something, but these were my personal barriers to joy. And by Jove did I try: I have played it, over and over, determined to find the key that unlocked something more than respect for The Royal Writ. But I never found it. I admired that it did something new, but then went on to bounce off all the innovations.
If you’re a deckbuilder hound who is starved of new ideas, The Royal Writ arrives with fanfare. It’s inordinately clever, beautifully presented and doesn’t have a single enemy, mana pool or elemental affinity to its name. Whether it will keep the interest is another matter. I found my interest drifting over a shortish period of time, but others have found something to love in its unorthodox inner works.
Important Links
The Royal Writ Is A Delightfully Dark Deckbuilder – Now On Game Pass, Xbox, PlayStation, Switch – https://www.thexboxhub.com/the-royal-writ-is-a-delightfully-dark-deckbuilder/
Download from the Xbox Store, through Game Pass if you like – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/the-royal-writ/9n034x5g08b7
