Ancient Enemy

My instinct when I see solitaire mechanics powering an RPG combat system is to reach for a spreadsheet and start cataloguing how quickly the whole thing falls apart. Ancient Enemy surprised me by holding up longer than expected. The core loop is pyramid-style solitaire: you match cards with a value one higher or lower than your active card, chaining runs to build a combo meter. That combo meter is the engine for everything else. Yellow cards charge your dagger strike, orange cards power your magic spells, and blue cards fill your defensive abilities. Get a long chain going and you unleash charged attacks at boosted potency; stall out and you eat whatever the enemy is cooking. It is mechanically lean, and that is precisely the point. The build decisions are real enough to be interesting, even if they never reach the depth of a Slay the Spire or a Monster Train. Before each combat you equip a loadout of abilities: offensive spells like Chaotic Blast sit alongside defensive buffs and healing items, up to three consumables at a time. Enemies carry elemental resistances, so swapping your orange spell loadout before a fire-resistant encounter is table stakes. The dagger attack is the one slot that never improves much, and by the back half of the game it is essentially a liability. Point that out to yourself early, prioritize magic and defense slots, and the difficulty curve flattens considerably. The game also hands you an in-battle Reset option: it refills the card board at the cost of breaking your active combo, which is a surprisingly useful pressure valve against tankier bosses. Two distinct encounter types, Puzzle and Battle, keep the pacing from going fully monotone. The tutorial deserves honest commentary. The game introduces mechanics at a reasonable pace, one new wrinkle per level, but it leaves important details unexplained. Wyrm wild cards, for instance, are consumed after each encounter and the game never tells you that. Similarly, abandoning a retry locks that encounter result until you replay the entire chapter. These are not fatal flaws, but they are the kind of omissions that will irritate players who like to know the rules before committing to a decision. On Nightmare difficulty, which multiple community voices recommend as the actual intended difficulty, the randomized card draws demand genuine attention and the ability synergies matter more. Default difficulty leans casual, perhaps too casual. Where the game earns its Steam rating of roughly 89 percent positive is the atmosphere. The art direction is strong: card board layouts form arches, runes, and latticework patterns that make the act of card-clearing feel deliberate rather than mechanical. The brooding post-apocalyptic tone, backed by dark ambient music, lands consistently. The story, however, stays thin throughout. You play a nameless Mage who woke up after the world already ended, and the writing never develops beyond that premise in any meaningful way. Character variety is sparse and the narrative monologues repeat their beats. It is the weakest part of the package and it is worth knowing going in that you are here for the card mechanics and art, not an involving plot. For a strategy-curious player who bounced off deckbuilders because the card acquisition loop felt too abstract, Ancient Enemy is actually a reasonable on-ramp. The solitaire base removes variable-cost card plays and replaces them with something more tactile and immediately readable. Sessions run short, fights last a few minutes each, and the gradual difficulty climb means newcomers are not immediately punished. Just play on Nightmare from the start. Diego, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Playable. Runs flawlessly on Linux out of the box. Based on 8 ProtonDB community reports.

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