Across the Obelisk Review (PC)

Across the Obelisk draws inspiration from a lot of games, but mostly it can be compared with Slay the Spire. However, developer Dreamsite Games is adding its own twist to the formula, one that makes it more colorful and funnier. Beyond core deck-building action, Across the Obelisk provides of plethora of other interesting mechanics such as a full base to upgrade with buildings that will help in your adventures, as well as armory to fit your heroes with items, and much more.

The premise of the game is less important, but it’s there for newcomers to the genre. Your team of heroes are undertaking an epic adventure in search of the Kingdom of Senenthia’s princess and court magician and attempt to find the relation between her disappearance and the mysterious obelisk that suddenly comes alive after being dormant for a very long time.

Although you start the game with a predefined party of four, you can unlock additional characters throughout your adventures. The setup of the party is quite traditional: tank, damage dealer, support, and healer. These are represented in the game by the four available classes: warrior, scouts, mage, and cleric. The nice thing is some warriors can make good damage dealers, and so do some supposedly support units.

In total, there are 16 unlockable characters, and while they all share the same skill tree, they come with five different perks that are very important when building your deck. Speaking of which, it might be overwhelming, but Across the Obelisk has more than 500 cards in the game, which can be upgraded for different effects.

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Just like in every other deck-building game, your starting decks will be pretty weak and will only get you through so many stages. However, in Across the Obelisk you’ll need a bunch more runs to make meaningful progress. Each finished run means new cards and items unlocked, and more resources available to upgrade the main hub.

Each map consists of various routes that you can take to reach the final boss of the stage. Quests are shown on the map as exclamation marks, while the book icons represent so-called “events” that have different outcomes depending on the choices you make. You might get rewarded with resources or you could end up fighting some nasty enemies.

To unlock new characters, you’ll need to finish their quests, which means you’ll need decent decks to progress to the maps where you can actually complete them. Of course, some characters might be more powerful than others, but only if you fit them with a suitable deck and items. There are entire builds based on one or two items, which makes Across the Obelisk rather frustrating at times.

With more than 200 items available in the game, chances are very slim that you’ll get the item you need, unless that item drops from a boss. On the bright side, the multitude of items and cards makes it easier to find and use different viable strategies. The problem is you’ll fight different enemies on each map, so they’ll be susceptible to other statuses than the ones you can inflict on them.

Speaking of statuses, Across the Obelisk can be overwhelming when it comes to the damage types and statuses: fire, ice, poison, shadow, bleed, slow, speed, insanity and a dozen more. That’s why you need multiple playthroughs to figure it all out, but the game certainly doesn’t encourage players to do that.

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One of the twists on the traditional formula is that you can redo any fight that you lost during a run. If you think you can win a fight that you just lost due to some unfortunate miss-click, then the game allows you to do that. However, you’ll be drawing the same cards and the enemy will use the same abilities in the same order, so unless you do things differently, the outcome will remain the same.

Across the Obelisk is a roguelite game, so at the end of each run, depending on how far you’ve been able to go, you’ll get a score that translates into money and runes (used to upgrade cards). At the beginning of a run, you have the option to add the rewards from a previous run to the current one, which makes the game much easier since you can upgrade many of the cards in your starting deck.

What I found a bit disappointing is that you can explore a single, short route on each map, so you won’t have too much time at your disposal before facing the boss. But the main problem of the game is that it’s fairly unbalanced at the latter stages with bosses that have bucketload of HP and powerful abilities that outdamage your healing abilities. Normally, these fights would turn into races against time, but the large HP pool of these bosses completely discourage these tactics. Unless you have the perfect composition, you’ll have a very hard time beating the game.

That said, the core mechanics, the deck building part and the fights are quite addictive. Although each run in Across the Obelisk can last even a few hours if you have a veteran party, you can always drop in the middle of it and pick up from where you left off. The fact that some bosses are bullet sponges artificially prolongs runs for those who manage to reach the latter stages of the game.

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The Good

The Bad

Conclusion