TRIALS OF FIRE

Trials of Fire is a single-player turn-based strategy game fused with deck-building mechanics, set in a post-cataclysmic fantasy world that looks like a watercolor fever dream. Whatboy Games built something genuinely interesting here: you control a party of three heroes simultaneously, but all of them draw from one shared card deck. That single design decision changes everything. You are not managing three separate combat rotations - you are solving a puzzle about card economy, positioning, and which hero gets the right ability at the right moment. It rewards the kind of player who likes to read a hand twice before committing. The worldbuilding leans hard into the desolation. The Great Burn reduced civilization to scattered survivors, warring factions, and desperate scavengers. Exploration happens across a hex-based overworld where every tile can be a trap, a find, or a nothing. Story beats arrive in short text vignettes - think gamebook more than cutscene - and they do enough to give the world texture without overstaying their welcome. The writing is spare and dry, which suits the tone. You will not get Disco Elysium-depth lore here, but you will get a setting that feels coherent and hostile in all the right ways. Combat is where the game earns its Very Positive reviews. Enemies telegraph intentions clearly, so most deaths feel like misreads rather than cheap shots. The class system gives you a roster of archetypes - warriors, shamans, rangers among them - each contributing different card types to the shared deck. Building synergies between a pyromancer and a brawler who benefits from burning tiles is the kind of thing you will think about while making coffee. Runs are relatively short by roguelite standards, which means experimentation actually happens rather than getting gated behind three-hour sessions. The flip side is that some build combinations feel dominant once you spot them, and the mid-tier difficulty can start to feel repetitive after a dozen runs before you push into the harder modifiers. The padding problem is mostly absent, which I appreciate. There are no filler fetch quests inflating a runtime. Each run has a purpose and a pressure. Where the game does wobble is in the later stages of a campaign, where the randomness of card and gear drops can leave a run feeling decided by the loot gods rather than your decision-making. That sting of a run collapsing because the card pool never gave you what your build needed is real, and not always satisfying. It is also a game that explains itself imperfectly - some mechanics require outside reading or deliberate experimentation to understand fully, which is a friction point for newcomers. For players who like their strategy games tight and their RPG systems legible but deep, Trials of Fire delivers a focused, well-crafted experience that respects your time. It is not trying to be a 100-hour epic. It is trying to be a sharp, repeatable tactical puzzle in a world worth caring about, and it mostly succeeds. Monika, Scout Team