Ancient Enemy is a turn-based card game with additional mechanics that are vaguely reminiscent of solitaire, but that description fails to capture just how engrossing it is. Imagine a card game that balances risk and reward just about perfectly, demanding short bursts of resource management as you try to hoard consumables that’ll be useful against your current chapter’s boss. Games like this always benefit from being easy to learn and difficult to master, and this describes Ancient Enemy perfectly. Actually, though, its challenge on the normal difficulty is more like “easy to learn, also easy to get so overwhelmed that you forget how numbers work”; a large part of the gameplay here consists of charging attacks and providing them with bonuses by clicking on cards one number higher or lower than your current card (provided such a card exists in the play field), and while that may sound incredibly easy, your stupid meat brain has a way of complicating things. I’ve had a great time thus far.

You play as an angsty guy called The Mage who awakes to a world overrun by some kind of evil that he and the other forces of good failed to stop. Before and after some levels, he’ll ramble on about how bad things are despite no one being around to hear, and most of the writing thus far has consisted of these soliloquies because most opponents can’t speak.

The whole thing is kind of silly because I’m downright incapable of not enjoying a mage wandering around and dramatically talking to himself, and Ancient Enemy‘s gameplay is clearly the point of the whole shebang anyway.

There are two types of maps, with the first having no opponent. During these maps, you do your best to remove every card from the playing field, which earns you currency that can be used to purchase new cards after the chapter ends in addition to consumable cards to use later.

You can only remove cards one number higher or lower than your current playable card, and whatever card you remove becomes your new playable card. You can also only select cards that are uncovered and facing you, so there’s rarely a convenient sequence counting up or down that you can rely on. There are equippables that give you passive powers that can shuffle everything on screen or change a number in your favor, thankfully, but you can only use these once or twice per map. Removing everything at once isn’t necessary, however—you can end your combo and start over with a new card, and your deck is large enough to give you just enough chances for these maps to be feasible but challenging.

Many of the cards you can access by removing the card/s on top of them are face-down, meaning that you’re left to guess which group will have the card you need. This works beautifully in Ancient Enemy‘s combat maps in which you go up against an opponent and have to beat them by reducing their HP to zero before they do the same to you. Your attacks and those of enemies can be magical and/or physical and have to be charged by matching cards of a corresponding color, so you’re balancing creating a giant combo with the needs of your current turn. If your opponent is about to perform an attack and your block card is enough to keep you from becoming damaged, there’s no reason to create a giant combo. On the other hand, if you can create a massive combo that increases the effectiveness of all of your cards and take out your opponent in a single blow, that might be a better option so long as you’re comfortable betting on the right cards appearing to keep your combo alive.

If I had to find one thing to criticize, it’d be that the “Wyrm” cards that function as wildcards to keep your combo alive are stackable (and get lost in the process since only one works at a time), and Ancient Enemy hasn’t been letting me put them away if I come up with a better strategy. What’s weird is that I could swear that putting them away was possible earlier in the game, which might suggest some kind of minor bug.

Ancient Enemy will be released on April 9th on Steam.

Impressions: Ancient Enemy is even better than I expected first appeared on Killa Penguin