During Gamescom I got to experience a demo for the newly announced Flask, a hand-drawn deck-building roguelike with several fun twists on the formula.
Flask is set in a fantasy world where you operate a mobile castle into unknown territory, with the goal of slaying monsters and accumulating riches for doing so.
With your team of warriors and misfits you’ll put together strategic decks of attacks, defensive moves and buffs to overcome all odds, though like any roguelike there’s always a bit of luck sprinkled in that’ll either make or break your desired build.
The biggest thing Flask has going for it is without a doubt the visuals. As I alluded to before everything in the game is hand-drawn and a painstaking amount of detail has gone into the characters and backdrops, with the world taking on a sort of puppet-show aesthetic with the way things bobbed and moved.
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The first run I watched played out slowly at first as the core mechanics were explained to me. Like other games in the genre players will choose their own path forward but rather than doing so on a room-by-room basis like Hades for example, players will know exactly what’s ahead of them depending on which path they pick.
There will of course be plenty of procedurally generated encounters to give you needed abilities, upgrades, gold and more, all leading up to a truly fantastic boss fight, another player.
That’s right, while you’ll be facing NPC enemies for most of a run once you come to the end you’ll face an echo of another player. It’ll copy the exact build they used and only the strongest will come out on top.
Personally I think this is a great idea, with my only concern being how the game chooses what echo you’ll be facing. Putting together a decent build only to come up against a boss that has a perfect counter to everything you’ve accumulated up until that point could border on unfair, though I’d assume a lot of balancing will play a factor. Regardless I like it a lot and when the game launches it’ll be fun to see what builds other players are running.
From what I’ve seen I’m very impressed with Flask, and as someone who prefers standard roguelikes rather than deck-building roguelikes I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t have my interest.