Menace from the Deep

I went into Menace from the Deep with my spreadsheet already open, expecting to find hidden synergy layers that reviewers had missed. What I found instead was a game that wears its inspirations honestly, executes the core loop with genuine atmosphere, and then trips over itself once you start pulling on the mechanical threads. That is not a death sentence for a deckbuilder in 2024, but it is a constraint you need to understand before you commit. The structure will feel immediately legible to anyone with Slay the Spire hours. You pick one of three character classes - Detective, Professor, or Cultist - each with a roster of starting decks to choose from, which is a small but meaningful customisation hook. The Detective leans on direct attack-and-defend patterns, the Professor summons allies like rats and crows, and the Cultist works through more esoteric, combo-adjacent strategies. Runs are split across multiple acts, each with roughly fourteen nodes per level: fights, merchants, event encounters, gas stations (yes, fuel management is a real pressure here), and motels for partial healing. Travel between nodes is handled through a dedicated card system rather than a map click, which is a tidy idea that adds one more micro-decision layer per route. Relics give persistent run buffs, Equipment and Consumables round out an inventory of three item types, and cards upgrade through use - meaning frequently played cards improve faster, rewarding commitment to a line rather than indecision. Two mechanics genuinely separate this from a straight Slay the Spire reskin. First, the sanity meter acts as a parallel loss condition: losing your mind is as fatal as losing your health, and low sanity alters event outcomes and triggers debuffs mid-run, so you are tracking two resources under pressure at all times. Second, the persistent base upgrade system lets you spend materials collected during runs to unlock new cards, boost starting health, and expand gear slots - meaning a failed run is rarely a total waste, which is a beginner-friendlier design choice than the genre average. The Cthulhu final boss carries accumulated damage across runs, turning what feels like repeated failure into a slow-burn war of attrition. That is a clever structural hook. Here is where the spreadsheet tells me to flag concerns. Card balance is uneven: a meaningful slice of the pool feels weak against the encounters you actually face, while a handful of relics and equipment pieces do most of the heavy lifting. Build variety is narrower than the class count implies, because the encounter difficulty variability punishes experimental decks hard. The deck bloat problem is real - without reliable card removal options, long runs accumulate cards that dilute synergies rather than sharpen them. The tutorial drops a wall of text on first launch rather than easing new players in turn-by-turn, which is a friction point Flat Lab has been slow to fix. AI difficulty scaling between acts is also inconsistent, with Act 2 difficulty spikes that feel more punishing than designed. For strategy-first players, these are flags that indicate a foundation that needs another polish pass. What the game gets unambiguously right is presentation. The 1920s noir-Lovecraft visual direction is bold and cohesive, the comic-book art style gives it a distinct shelf identity, and the voice acting is noticeably above indie-tier. The atmosphere does genuine work. Steam user reviews sit at a healthy majority positive across over 800 ratings, suggesting the audience that fits this game finds it rewarding enough for repeat runs - the "one more run" pull is real, even when the mechanical seams are visible. For newcomers to the genre, the base-upgrade system and the persistent Cthulhu damage mechanic make this more approachable than its difficulty curve implies: dying is always progress, and that matters. For genre veterans, approach it as a supplementary title for when Slay the Spire and Inscryption are fully exhausted, not as a replacement.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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