Quick Look: SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech

Uh, this looks fun.

(Also. Can we get a CT sequel (not remake!) in this art style)

Gwent Crimson curse and Tronebreaker curse are 10 times better

I love all the Steamworld games and had been looking forward to Quest, but I wish it wasn't card-based.

Steamworld is such a fun take on every genre they touch. I'm glad they're doing an RPG-card game.

Did Jan mention what the binary looking patterns on the bottom of the cards are for? Maybe I missed it.

@bakoomerang: He said they are purely aesthetic. Just there to make them look like old computer punch cards.

I feel like the first Steamworld game I would want to play would be the one that came out before this one, but this looks quite alright as well. Combat looks fun, and it has a great art style!

Hope it isnt just on switch for too long, looking forward to this on PC!

Brad asked about it, and they don't know what it means. They resemble old IBM mainframe punch cards, which have 90 vertical columns from 0-9. This only has 14 columns of the zero and the one.

It would be interesting to see if there is a pattern to the punches that represent each card, or if it is just randomly generated and pasted on the card's image.

Oh cool, the combat system in this reminds me of Fate/Grand Order a bit, with the card combos leading to extra attacks and all. That's a good system in FGO, it's neat to see another game doing something similar.

Are you telling me that Steamworld has done a better job of expanding their universe than Trackmania?!

This looks nice.

I enjoy Slay The Spire a lot, but the art in that game just looks straight up unfinished... I feel like if they did a few more passes on the presentation it would be a lot more palatable. They may have intended for it to be minimalist, but it rides the edge of looking and sounding cheap at times. The music is great though.

I was interested in a Steamworld RPG... then I saw the card system. Nope! I am too sick of card systems and can't think of many design choices that would turn me off quicker.

Anyone else get super big Dragon's Crown vibes off the artstyle, right up until the card game part?

"Year of the Card Game" was like 2-3 years ago. Last year was the "Year of Card Games that has been stuck in development for too long to catch the trend".

Word up on the shout up to Baten Kaitos. Probably my favorite game that generation.

I would totally buy Baten Kaitos collection on Switch.

I'm still here for a good card based system as long as it isn't Gwent or Artifact. This seems neat, too bad I just fell in a Dragon's Dogma hole. Will surely still get this at some point since Steamworld games are pretty alright.

I like card games, JRPG's, and Steam World, but man, this game looks incredibly tedious to me. Could be because Jan's over-leveled throughout this QL?

Edit: Little things in this just feel off to me. The characters don't look expressive to me and the hits don't land with any impact. World design seems really linear, and there doesn't seem to be an interest in motivating the player to explore. Enemy design variety looks really limited. Having basic animations run so long that you'd even want to hit the double speed button seems like a problem. I don't know if there's something wrong with me, but my reaction to this QL seems to be pretty off from everyone else's.

Can't wait for GB to finally cover 2018s game and card game of the year, Gwent: Thronebreaker. It's kind of hilarious how much they talked about the scamfest that was Artifact and still don't really even know that Thronebreaker exists, despite it being the first CDPRed game since Witcher 3.

That first enemy they fought looks like Clunk from Awesomenauts wearing a cat. Maybe an inspiration?

Wait a second, I play a metric ton of Slay the Spire and I can't recall any cards that don't work on bosses.

I wish this was closer to a Slay The Spire clone. At least until that's finally on Switch

Love the Steamworld universe, will probably check this out

YOU KNOW YOU PLAY TOO MUCH DOTA WHEN:

- Ben says "Meepo" and you immediately start spamming your poof-blink-eblade-net rotation into an empty notepad window

kinda bothered that even though the punch cards are purely aesthetic, they have both the 0 and 1 punched for some bits.

this looks good though

Year of the card game is right. I really wish the duders would check out MTG Arena... best card game out there.

I keep wanting to check this out because I played Magic since 1994 and MTG Online was disgusting waste of money. I've played almost every Planeswalker game on PC hoping they will eventually get to the point that it feels like playing Magic and it has always fallen short. What makes Arena so special? Is there any AI opponents and can you just build whatever decks you want without having to spend an ass load of cash?

Well honestly It's free to play so worth checking out on that regard. Each day you earn a preconstructed deck, eventually earning all 15 decks for free. You can use all those cards and build a deck anyway you'd like. Just playing the game you will complete your daily challenges which you can use to buy new packs and you'll earn wild cards so you can get ANY card you want. Arena uses standard rules for it's format, no legacy cards. Every weekend they have fun unique formats to try out.

I believe they just added bot support to practice your decks... although I would just hop in and play other people. There is no chat or bad manners to worry about. Zero wait time for finding matches.

Just make sure you finish the tutorials everyday and you will get some cards to mess around with. There is a welcome bundle I believe... which would be worth buying for 5$. It has its F2P trappings but I believe it's all very fair.

To top all that off... a new Planeswalker themed set is coming out tomorrow! It will shake up the meta quite a bit. Mono red and Mono blue can burn in hell.

@loktarogar: To be fair: even as a fairly big CDPR fan I regularly forget Thronebreaker exists and am still not even 100% sure what kind of game it is (Baldurs Gate with Gwent? Dragon Commander with Gwent? Based on context I assume there is definitely a lot of Gwent). I think it also was a half-assed attempt to push Galaxy by having a laughably short exclusivity window before CDP realized folk weren't going to migrate to the GoG client? I've been meaning to give it a go, but I am still working through my backlog of Larian, Obsidian, and inXile games.

Regardless: I The time investment it takes to give those kinds of games a fair shake coupled with the difficulty of finding particularly good spots to highlight in VOD form tend to mean that Youtubers/Streamers ignore it. The folk who will enjoy it know about it. The rest don't care.

I would be interested in anything that could break my Slay the Spire addiction, but I'm not sure this will do so. Slay the Spire just has the perfect mix of challenge, different strategies in deckbuilding, randomness, and quick play, even after 100+ hours in it.

The combat reminds me of Fate/GO. Guess I’ll give this a shot.

Or a new one! We are drowning in remakes, collections, re-releases and ports. I would love some new games or some new entries in series i like :) i still have my Gamecube hooked up even though it doesnt look great, and if i ever see a decent that HDMI adapter for it go on sale for less than $70- $100 i can actually play those games again!... ha-ha

@brad - Its a shame its not out on other platforms yet for faithful fans of the series - but I guess i might want this on Switch anyway - as i dont have a ton of games to play on it right now; (hence why Steamworld Dig 2 sold so well!)..
They did say SWD2 sold 10 times as much on Switch as it did Steam. They didn't attribute that to bigger fans or anything though, just that hitting a console at launch when there is nothing else to play on it is the way to do it! They sold well on Playstation 4 with the original Steamworld Dig because they hit the launch window there too:

"[We had] been rewarded for being an early adopter in the past, too. Just months after the PS4 launched, we ported the original SteamWorld Dig. It was a hit.

“We had no idea what to expect in terms of sales,” said Sigurgeirsson. “Also, at that time Sony's tracking system was down and they had to tell me the total figure over the phone. I remember being pleasantly surprised! In general that means that having a game ready when a new platform rolls out is very important, a key factor to good sales.”

@gundato said:

There are trailers that explain exactly what it is. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVp8Vd76jV8

I'm not sure how the PC exclusivity went between Galaxy and Steam, since I just got it on Galaxy when it came out, but it's also been out on PS4/Xbox since early December (which is not the best version to play, mind you). It's bad enough that they never looked at Thronebreaker, but they also never looked at the (free to play) multiplayer game even though it was in closed and open beta for years and has also been out for real since October of last year. Between Alex's Hearthstone history and Vinny's Witcher fandom, it is baffling this somehow went under the radar of the East office in particular. Half of the Gwent battles you play in Thronebreaker are handcrafted puzzles, so there's even something for Dan to like.

The comparisons to Artifact are even more relevant considering how fair multiplayer Gwent is with giving you rewards. You can even play Thronebreaker (which is not free, but a $25 purchase for a fantastic 30~ hour campaign) to unlock stuff in the multiplayer game (nothing exclusive or gamebreaking, but fancier versions of cards and avatars you'd have to craft/earn/unlock otherwise). It's every bit as generous and high quality as you'd expect from a CDPR game.

Slay the Spire is fun but this is something I've always disliked. Almost all of the art looks really flat and boring, like the first layer of colour on a drawing tablet. It stops me from playing it too much just because it doesn't look very good.

At this point this studio's products are pretty much an instabuy from me.

Totally with Ben on the Baiten Kaitos vibes. Though it really is more of a vibe thing than any real correspondence; the system in Baiten Kaitos is ultimately very different from this (the combo system in that game was something else). Reminds me that I have yet to go back and play the sequel.

Came for Ben making a Baiten Kaitos reference and was not disappointed.

I'm surprised that they are so enamoured by this given that they don't care at all about turnbased RPG's. Brad's comment was pretty much on point. This is a turn based RPG with cards instead of a menu or AP points to spend. Like this game could very easily get rid of the card system & implement AP points instead. Seems like you get 3 actions per turn, but some of those attacks like the 'All In' card drain all your 3 AP at once.

What makes a cardgame an interesting cardgame to me, is having a large amount of different cards & then figuring out how you can consistantly be able to manipulate your deck to get the right cards in your hand at the right time. This straight up doesn't seem to have enough different cards in a deck & too many free redraws to make that deck building aspect important. Or choosing between a strong agressive start vs controlling the game to be victorious in the lategame. This doesn't really seem to offer those kind of choices. There's like 1 big card per deck , like all-in, that you want to avoid getting early on. All cards play out on the same turn to boot. Feels very limited to me compared to the hearthstone's & magic's of the world