Across The Obelisk: Sands of Ulminin

Across the Obelisk is a roguelite deckbuilder with a branching campaign map, solo or co-op play for up to four players, and a card-crafting system deep enough to swallow entire evenings. You pick a party of heroes from a growing roster, each with their own card pool and playstyle, then plot a route through a web of nodes that include combat encounters, shops, events, and story choices that can permanently alter your run. It sits comfortably alongside Slay the Spire as a reference point, but the multiplayer angle and multi-character party management push it closer to an RPG than a solo puzzler. The card mechanics are where the game earns its Very Positive rating. Each hero has a distinct identity: a summoner who floods the board with creatures, a poison-stacking rogue, a tank who literally wants to get hit. Mixing four characters' decks into a coherent strategy is genuinely satisfying, and the upgrade system lets you reshape individual cards so your build can drift far from the default archetype. Late-game synergies can feel broken in the best way, which is exactly the kind of power fantasy a deckbuilder should deliver. Co-op adds a layer of coordination that solo play can't replicate, and watching a well-oiled four-person team chain their abilities is the game's best moment. The campaign is split across multiple acts with persistent narrative threads that unlock over many runs. Story events can give your party boons, punish greed, or open entirely new character questlines, which gives the repetition some meaningful texture. The writing is functional rather than exceptional - do not come here for Disco Elysium-level prose - but it does its job of making node choices feel weighty rather than arbitrary. The worldbuilding around the kingdom of Senenthia is sketched in lightly, enough to create atmosphere without demanding lore investment. Where it stumbles is pacing on longer runs and a relatively steep barrier for new players dropped into co-op with veterans. The early acts can feel slow before your deck hits critical mass, and the sheer number of cards, items, and character-specific mechanics means the learning curve is front-loaded in a way that occasionally tips into frustrating. Solo runs are viable and still engaging, but the game clearly prioritises the party experience, so if you are planning to play alone you might occasionally feel like you are using a two-seat sports car as a commuter vehicle. For card-game fans and RPG players who like building systems more than reading cutscenes, this hits a reliable sweet spot. The build variety holds up well past hour 40, which is the real test. Filler content exists in the lighter event nodes, but the runs rarely feel padded in the way a bad RPG grinds out XP for its own sake. Across the Obelisk is the kind of game you close planning to play one more run and then look up to find it is 2am.

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