Across the Obelisk: Amelia, the Queen (DLC)

Across the Obelisk is a co-op deckbuilding roguelite where you draft cards, build synergies, and push through branching node maps with a party of heroes. Each hero DLC in this lineup adds a single character with a distinct mechanical hook, and Amelia, the Queen is no exception. Her signature gimmick is retrieval: cards that would normally disappear into the vanish pile become fuel for her engine, letting her loop back resources that other heroes simply discard and forget. That one design decision opens up a genuinely different construction space compared to the base roster. In practice, Amelia leans into cold damage and frost-based status effects, which already have reasonable support in the base card pool. Her retrieval ability is where the ceiling gets interesting. Vanish mechanics in deckbuilders usually function as a hard cost, a trade-off where power comes with permanent consumption. Amelia partially breaks that contract, which means she rewards players who plan several turns ahead and understand which cards are worth cycling back. If you enjoy the puzzle side of deckbuilding, the part where you trace a chain of interactions and realise you have an engine, she delivers that feeling more reliably than most heroes. The caveats are what you would expect from a single-character hero pack. If you are not already invested in Across the Obelisk, this is the wrong entry point. The DLC assumes you own the base game and have enough hours in it to appreciate what a novel vanish-recovery mechanic actually changes about card selection. There is no standalone story campaign, and the lore content here is lightweight, a quest thread tied to saving a place called Senenthia. The narrative is functional rather than rich. Do not come to Amelia hoping for the kind of character writing that makes you sit with a hero for weeks. Come for the build space. For co-op players, Amelia slots in as a support-adjacent damage dealer whose cold synergies can mesh well with teammates running debuff or slow strategies. Online co-op is supported, so if your regular Obelisk group is hunting a fresh option, she provides exactly that without disrupting established party compositions. Solo players get the same mechanical novelty but will feel the absence of deep quest writing more acutely. Bottom line: this is a mechanical expansion first and a narrative one almost not at all. The retrieval-from-vanish hook is the kind of specific, clever idea that deckbuilding fans will clock immediately as worth exploring. Everyone else should start with the base game and revisit this once the core systems feel familiar. Monika, Scout Team