Crown Trick

My first instinct with Crown Trick was skepticism: the roguelite market is glutted, and a turn-based dungeon-crawler risks feeling like slow-motion chaos rather than genuine strategy. Forty-plus hours later, that skepticism is gone. NEXT Studios built something structurally clever here. The core hook is synchronous turn-based movement: enemies only act when you do, so the dungeon is a frozen puzzle waiting for you to make your move. That single design choice separates Crown Trick from action-adjacent roguelites like Dead Cells and puts it firmly in thinking-player territory, closer in spirit to a grid-tactics game than anything with a dodge-roll. The mechanical depth is real and layered. Your protagonist Elle carries nine distinct weapon classes, rifles that pierce lines of enemies, shotguns that blast adjacent tiles, axes and staves each with their own attack footprint and reload rhythm. On top of that, familiars won by defeating mini-bosses grant two active abilities each, and you can carry two at a time, meaning the familiar pairing choice is the single highest-leverage decision in any given run. A fire dragon plus a poison-cloud familiar plays completely differently from an ice-and-electricity build, especially once you factor in the eight-element system where Drenched enemies take extra physical damage and electrified wet enemies chain hits across groups. Relics, of which there are over 170, provide passive modifiers that range from straightforward damage boosts to double-edged curses. The Blink mechanic, a teleport that does not spend a turn, ties it all together: you use it to maintain the Break chain on stunned enemies, which in turn refills your Blink and mana, creating an offensive loop that rewards aggression over passive play. Build variety is where Crown Trick earns its replay hours. Between runs you spend soul shards in the Hall of Reincarnation on permanent upgrades and new blueprint drops, which expand the weapon pool available in future dungeons. The progression is steady enough that early runs feel productive rather than wasteful, though critics rightly flag one annoying design quirk: unspent shards decay if you leave the hub without banking them into upgrades, which feels like artificial drag on what should be a clean loop. RNG on familiar and relic drops can also be punishing. Dual-blade weapons in particular are widely considered underpowered given how close you have to stand to attack, and some familiars are noticeably weaker than others. Certain runs will simply hand you a subpar loadout, and the dungeon-sameness across rooms becomes apparent over many hours because procedural generation only goes so far when the room pool is finite. For newcomers to the genre, this is actually one of the more approachable entry points available. Because nothing moves until you move, there is no mechanical pressure to react quickly. The tutorial is thorough without being condescending, enemy attack patterns are telegraphed visibly on the grid tiles before they execute, and the meta-progression layer means failed runs still feel like forward momentum. The difficulty ramps honestly and the OpenCritic aggregate of 81, paired with a Metacritic score of 83, reflects a game that critics broadly found to be a strong effort rather than a flawed experiment. Steam's user review base lands at 86 percent positive, which is a reliable signal that the community reception has been consistent over time. Where Crown Trick falls short of the genre's best is endgame depth. Once you have unlocked most upgrades and seen the main dungeon themes, there is a ceiling to how much the build variety can sustain interest compared to something with a true run-modifier system. The hand-drawn art is charming throughout, the soundtrack sets a good tone floor to ceiling, and the writing around the Crown companion has enough dry wit to make the story beats land, but replayability is the legitimate question mark for anyone coming in as a seasoned roguelite veteran expecting Hades-tier variety.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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