When covering the release of Neurodeck‘s patch 1.1, I mentioned that it was going to receiving additional patches that further refine the gameplay. One month later, we’re already at patch 1.2, which adds the ability to see your predicted damage output ahead of time. This could be handy for anyone who can’t visualize how various buffs and damage cards combine damage-wise. New cards have been added, phobia bosses have been buffed or nerfed to benefit the overall balance, and “new unique effects.”
“Unique effects” is a vague way of phrasing it, but they’re actually very noticeable purple and red vignetting effects that occur when your stamina or sanity have been depleted to a dangerous point. This provides you with much more feedback when you’re burning through your stamina so that you don’t find yourself one card away from winning and unable to play it because you mindlessly used up all of your stamina. The rebalancing is less noticeable, but I was able to squeak out a win against Nosophobia—one of the harder final bosses in the pre-release and final release versions of Neurodeck—and it felt good.
The new cards are kind of interesting, too. One provides you with a selection of three cards that you can pull into your hand, giving you an “in case of emergency break glass” card that affords you some flexibility. There are also cards that grant you block (which was previously a boss-only ability) or strip block off of everybody, which serves as a helpful counter to the bosses who can arbitrarily put up 40 points of block on some of their turns. Before, you had to use the card that did 16 damage against enemies with block, and even then, you could rarely afford to damage your opponent’s life bar after all of that effort.
I ended up finishing a playthrough for the first time since I reviewed Neurodeck, and one of the features I noticed seems to have been added in the last patch: items no longer cost an action to use. In the release version, you had to spend an action point putting an item card into your item slot, then an additional action to use that item. Ever since 1.1, items have only cost an action to put them into an item slot. Some items have multiple uses, too, which means that they’re now incredibly powerful. It doesn’t feel like they break the game’s difficulty, though, since I only barely finished the playthrough, and that was with the difficulty-adding “resilience” feature dialed all the way back to zero. Items just feel more natural now.
Anyway, I don’t imagine that I’ll find the time to revisit Neurodeck every time it’s improved, but it’s come a long way in a relatively short amount of time and I can’t help but respect the hell out of that. They even appear to be planning on including a new phobia boss fight despite the amount of work adding something like that requires. Sadly, Neurodeck‘s Steam score hasn’t appeared to budge despite these significant improvements; indie games tend to suffer a major dropoff in interest shortly after release, meaning there are far fewer people around to appreciate the changes. But anyone who’s interested in the game and/or waiting on the Switch port will be glad to hear that it’s already much more fun to play now.
Meanwhile, Neurodeck‘s continuing to improve first appeared on Killa Penguin
