Iris and the Giant

Iris and the Giant is a compact fusion of collectible card game mechanics, roguelike structure, and light RPG progression, built around one quietly devastating premise: a young girl named Iris confronting her inner demons through a hand-drawn imaginary world. Developed solo by Louis Rigaud, it sits in that rare category of games where the mechanical loop and the emotional narrative actually reinforce each other instead of just coexisting awkwardly on the same screen. The core gameplay has you moving Iris through procedurally arranged encounters, spending cards each turn to attack, defend, or apply status effects against a bestiary of cute-but-loaded enemies - each creature representing a specific fear or memory. Your deck grows run by run, and the roguelike layer means you are constantly making tense decisions about which cards to keep, which upgrades to take, and how much risk your current health pool can absorb. It is not as deep as Slay the Spire in terms of raw deck-building complexity, but that is not really the point. The card economy here is tighter and more forgiving, aimed at players who want to feel the tension without needing a spreadsheet. What sets Iris apart from the wider roguelike-card-game crowd is tone and restraint. The writing is minimal but precise. Buried memories surface between runs as short, text-based vignettes that slowly fill in Iris's backstory, and the emotional weight of those fragments lands harder than you might expect from a game this small. It does not overstay its welcome - a full run clocks in around an hour, and the narrative builds across multiple attempts in a way that feels intentional rather than padded. For players who have grown tired of roguelikes using procedural generation as an excuse to avoid actual storytelling, this is a meaningful counterexample. The weaknesses are real but minor. Build variety, while present, is limited compared to genre heavyweights. After a handful of runs you will have seen most of what the card pool offers, and the strategic ceiling is lower than dedicated CCG fans might want. There is no multiplayer, no class system, no branching build paths that fundamentally change how a run plays. If you come in expecting Slay the Spire depth or Monster Train complexity, you will bounce off feeling underserved. What you get instead is a tightly authored single-player experience that knows exactly how long it wants to be. For RPG and narrative-focused players, the replay value comes from completing the story rather than optimizing an infinite meta. The emotional payoff of the final runs is genuinely earned, and the art direction - clean, hand-drawn, using a muted palette that occasionally cracks into warmer colors - does real work in setting mood. It is the kind of game that sticks in your head not because of a spectacular boss fight but because of a single line of text that hit unexpectedly close to home. Iris and the Giant is best understood as a short, emotionally literate game wearing roguelike mechanics as a delivery system for something more personal. If that sounds like your thing, it absolutely delivers.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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