Prismata is a promising card-based strategy game that’s currently in Early Access, and there are some things that we need to get out of the way before diving into what it’s like to play. First off, I couldn’t get this thing to launch for the longest time, only to eventually figure out that you can’t access the single-player content if the game is unable to connect to the server. The reason for this seems to boil down to the single-player content unlocking some stuff that you can use in multiplayer, but this is always-online DRM regardless of how much justification the game technically has for being designed this way. I don’t review games that use always-online DRM as a matter of principle, and while I could stand to make that clearer, Prismata’s store page is similarly guilty of a lack of clarity. In fact, the only way to tell that it requires an internet connection is the the mention of a “broadband Internet connection” in the system requirements, and it’s easy to assume this applies only to the multiplayer. Steam needs a more reliable way of indicating which games are online-only.

Another thing is that I was sent a key for this, and I have no idea what kind of key it actually is. There are two different versions that can be purchased at the moment, with one including DLC that makes later single-player story chapters available once they release, but the store page says that anyone who purchases the game while in Early Access will receive the exact same things the DLC claims to offer. It’s difficult to get invested in a game not knowing if the later story will be held hostage, or even if the single-player will someday be unshackled from the online requirement so that I can review it in the first place. This is possibly the only time I’ll cover Prismata.

With that out of the way…

Here’s a video I made while trying to figure out why the game would get stuck at 95% while loading. You can’t even get to the menu without a connection. I know some people don’t mind this, but I’m into old games enough to recognize the graveyards of online-only games that might as well have never existed. If you fall in love with a game, you should be able to hold onto it for as long as you want without the possibility of it evaporating one day and leaving you with nothing but memories.

Another thing I’m not thrilled about is the way F12 has the same functionality as the escape key. F12 has a long and storied history as a screenshot key, and making other keys pinch hit for it is just throwing a wrench in people’s muscle memory. Sometimes this can be worked around if the menus are slow enough for you to grab the screen prior to their arrival, but that’s sadly not the case with Prismata.

Which means all my screenshots of matches look like this.

And all of my screenshots of dialogue look like this.

Some single-player gameplay

Prismata boils down to a card-based tug of war in which you and your opponent are rapidly building up resources. The goal, at least as far as I can tell from the single-player campaign, is trying to balance offense and defense in such a way that you cripple your opponent’s ability to produce more units without sacrificing too many of your own. These early parts of the campaign act as a kind of tutorial and teach you the ins and outs, like which cards produce which resources and what rolls over between turns rather than disappearing into nothingness. The majority of the video above, however, is me trying to complete an optional objective in a single level.

And failing. Horribly. The optional goal is to win within a certain number of turns, and I never succeeded. This encounter is split into two parts, but the optional goal seems to shift based on which turn you ended the first part on, and that suggests that there’s a very specific, almost puzzle-like solution to make it work. Whatever it is, though, I don’t yet have enough of a handle on the mechanics to figure it out.

I decided to move on with that optional objective gnawing at the back of my skull, repeatedly whispering “unfinished, unfinished.” It wasn’t long before another optional objective popped up, and this time I refused to give up. The goal this time wasn’t to win by a certain turn, but to breach an enemy’s defenses (which is to say, knock out all of their defensive cards) by turn 9. It took some doing, but I eventually found a way to accomplish this. A small victory, but a victory nonetheless. Anyway, those two videos cover a fairly sizable amount of the first chapter (or “episode,” as the game calls it) and I’d hate to potentially spoil anything later on, so that’s where I stopped.

Prismata is surprisingly enjoyable, if periodically maddening—arguably in a good way—because of its optional objectives, but this is as far as I go while its single-player campaign requires internet access. That’s not going to cut it when the internet goes out (or slows to a crawl as it has right now, ensuring that I’ll have to post this hours upon hours after writing it to wait for all of the videos to finish uploading).

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