Welcome back to Save State, where we like roguelites. KEMCO and EXE Create are probably two of the more well-known mobile RPG developers, making a lot of games that look like they came right out of RPG Maker. Around the time when I got my first smartphone, I would pick up various RPGs on my phone to play while I was waiting for rides or between college classes. During downtime, I would often see KEMCO’s logo pop up on my phone’s screen despite the fact that many of their titles lacked any real strategic depth. Overrogue, which I just discovered was in my Steam library, revealed to me that KEMCO grew up a lot during the decade or more that I haven’t really touched their games, as they delivered an excellent roguelite card battler that’s just a pinch too heavy on grinding.

Overrogue has a really by the book story: You play as Sael, the Demon Overlord’s vampire son, who gets involved in a big competition to become the next Overlord. Soon after you begin, a doll named Elize and a beastperson named Narba join him on his journey as Sael has to challenge a number of labyrinths and emerge victorious in order to qualify to take up the role. The characters have their endearing moments, but if the story isn’t exactly what you’re into, it’s worth mentioning that Overrogue shows you how to turn off the cutscenes almost immediately so you can dig right into the card battling.

In Overrogue, players pick a deck to use and a labyrinth to challenge and then will be shown a dungeon map that lets you pick which route you’d like to venture. You’ll encounter battle spaces as well as event, treasure, shop, and even altar spaces that can upgrade your stats or recover HP. Choices you make during event spaces are saved and revealed to you in each run, so if you pick an option and it results in you losing HP but gaining a treasure, the option will conveniently say “-4 HP, gain treasure box” or something like that. It’s extremely nice to not have to try and remember which option gives a more beneficial result, and events don’t seem to be entirely randomized.

Battle spaces are where you will spend the bulk of your time while earning money, demon coins, new cards, and possibly even powerful treasures for winning. Overrogue’s battle system is simple yet still interesting enough to keep you playing for hours because it’s a basic turn-based system that shows you the action order at the top of the screen. Players control three characters in battle total, and each of those will be able to spend mana on cards drawn from the deck for their turn. Your characters draw five cards for their turn unless something prevents them from doing so, and at the beginning your mana total is three, so you can play three cards that cost a single mana, or a single big, powerful card that costs three, things like that.

The character in front of your party is the one predominantly receiving damage, and you can spend one of your mana to rotate your three characters around to better spread out the damage, which also yields a small heal to the character being moved from the vanguard to the rear. Knowing when to spend a mana on changing your party’s formation is really important because it’s basically the only guaranteed source of health recovery you have when you’re starting out, as there’s no automatic regeneration or anything like that. You can heal at specific spaces or if you get lucky and find cards that do so, but you’re still going to want to regularly rotate your party’s composition because a single character taking too many hits and going down means you lose 33% of your turns, which can quickly snowball into a loss.

The actual decks (called themes) in Overrogue have a wide variety of synergies with cards across a high number of rarities. Ultra rare cards are obviously going to be harder to find than some common cards, and sometimes you can completely warp your deck around them for maximum benefit. For example, in the first deck, you can find a powerful higher rarity card that increases the damage of all cards with “slash” in the name by 40% of its attack value, so gradually reducing the cards in your deck until you’re guaranteed to receive it every hand which can result in you dealing hundreds of damage per turn. Realizing synergies like this are powerful and are likely what clued me in to how the single most beneficial thing you can buy at the shop is the ability to remove a card from your deck: Consistency is king.

There are a lot of cards and unlockables for you to use in Overrogue too. There are five total decks, and each deck has its own separate card unlocks which will then cause them to show up randomly in future runs. To unlock cards, you have to play a gacha machine by spending demon coins, which plentifully drop from challenge runs. You also have a roulette wheel you can spin for some demon coins and blightstones a few times each day.

Blightstones are the separate currency you use for permanent unlocks, but Overrogue is so ludicrously stingy with this resource that I will likely put the game down before I ever unlock the ability to start a run with four mana. For perspective, I played for roughly eight hours and had 660 blightstone- the first mana upgrade costs 3,000. So, you’ll be playing for quite a while before getting an impactful number of permanent upgrades. The good news is that you’ll unlock plenty of stickers, which have bonuses like +1 maximum HP and boons such as that, from the gacha, so it’s not like you’ll go entirely without useful meta progression while you work toward your blightstone goals.

Most likely the currencies are a carryover from Overrogue’s mobile roots, though I am very thankful that there’s no option to pay additional money to get more blightstones. The length of Overrogue seems to be around 20-30 hours of play, though I’m a little under the halfway point as of this writing, but it seems like you’ll have to dedicate your time to some challenge runs to even begin to unlock most of the progression options unless you strike it big in the roulette lottery. The good news is that while the story battles are all pretty easy, you can really ramp up the difficulty if you yearn for more of a challenge, perfect for veterans of games like Slay the Spire.

Overrogue features a karma system where winning a run on a labyrinth stage will allow you to impose stacking challenges for greater rewards should you win. Later stages in Overrogue can be especially brutal with several instances of karma enabled, so it’d be awfully nice if I had access to, say, +1 mana each turn, but apparently, I have to do a load of grinding before I’ll unlock such a wonderful upgrade.

Overrogue is a super fun card battling roguelite that really seems like it wants the player to invest a boatload of time in it, and while I have enjoyed it, I’m not sure I’ll stick around after beating it to unlock those exorbitantly priced upgrades. I probably could complain about games that mistake grinding for content all day because I’m not a seven-year-old kid with only one title to play for months anymore, but that’s probably the subject for a different column entry.

With that, I think I’ll bring this entry of Save State to a close. It was fun seeing the developer of those cute but kind of vapid JRPGs I used to play in between classes come up with their own spin on a Slay the Spire-like formula. Talk about a glow-up! It’s always nice to keep an open mind… and probably a wallet. The moths in there need air. See you next time!