Nadir: A Grimdark Deckbuilder

I track decision trees for a living, so when a deckbuilder ships a genuinely novel combat system, I pay attention. Nadir's core hook is real: every card in your hand costs not mana, but an enemy reaction. Each opponent telegraphs three face-up cards coloured red or blue, and playing one of your own dual-sided cards charges those enemy cards toward activation. Push too hard in one colour, and the enemy's charged card flips and punishes you. The redraw mechanic adds another wrinkle - dump your hand for a fresh draw, but every foe has a unique redraw reaction that fires immediately. It is, functionally, a puzzle where you are always one bad sequence away from your own defeat. For the kind of player who back-solves board states, that loop is genuinely satisfying. The three playable characters - Jeanne d'Arc, Vlad Tepes, and Hernan Cortes - each carry a distinct starting deck and stat spread. Jeanne opens with armor, making her the safest entry point; Vlad leans into bleed synergies; Cortes rewards riskier, aggressive lines. Between runs you return to the city of Nadir, spending expedition resources to expand buildings that unlock new card slots, vendor access, and character upgrades. On paper that persistence layer sounds like it adds Darkest Dungeon-style weight to each run. In practice the city-building loop feels thin and undercooked - buildings rarely shift your strategic calculus enough to change how you approach the next expedition, and the card crafting system, which lets you fuse red and blue abilities into custom dual cards, gives almost no feedback on what you actually built. That last point is a real problem in a game where reading outputs is the entire game. The tutorial covers the absolute basics and then bows out at the wrong moment. Status effects like Bleed, Decay, Piercing, and Stealth either appear mid-run with zero explanation or require you to stop and manually inspect an enemy card mid-combat. That friction is fixable with a patch but has persisted since launch, and the Steam review score sitting around 62 percent positive reflects it. The visual presentation, to its credit, is not the issue. The art pulls from Dante, pulpy horror comics, and Sin City-era high-contrast noir - it is loud, confident, and unlike most of its genre neighbours. The audio supports the tone without overselling it. Where does this leave newcomers to the genre? Honestly, the core combat system is approachable faster than the tutorial implies. Once you internalise the red-blue charge economy and stop thinking of enemy cards as threats to avoid and start treating them as resources to manage, the difficulty spikes start feeling solvable rather than arbitrary. The problem is that Nadir never quite scaffolds that shift in thinking for you. Veterans of Slay the Spire or Monster Train will recalibrate quickly; players coming in cold will hit a wall of unexplained status interactions and possibly bounce before the system clicks. If you're willing to spend your first two runs simply mapping enemy reaction patterns rather than trying to win, the third run starts to feel like a proper strategic exercise. The honest summary is that Nadir shipped with a strong central idea and not enough game around it. The city-building layer needed another six months, the card crafting needed a results screen, and the tutorial needed three more pages. It is worth your time if the dual-colour charge mechanic sounds compelling and you buy at a meaningful discount. At full price it competes directly with Slay the Spire and Monster Train, and loses that comparison on content depth and polish.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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