Decks of Dexterity commits one of the worst sins of gameplay design: intentionally removing your agency.
In this game, which is a mishmash of genres, your goal is to defeat deadly geometric objects that fling other geometric objects at you, which you are also a geometric object. During the active phase, you’re in a bullet hell where you can’t do anything but dodge the bullets. If you collect a large green block, you’re allowed to enter the card phase. You use your deck to heal, damage, or perform some other utility that can help you avoid bullets. Bullet hell/card game wasn’t on my bingo card, but now it exists, and it’s functionally interesting.
Small green squares exist that allow you to teleport around the space to dodge bullets, put yourself in an advantageous position, or drop right on a large green block to enter the card phase. I chained quite a few large green blocks to do massive damage. That’s fun.
Bosses demonstrate how broken the idea is. In a typical bullet hell, there’s always a way out. It’s difficult to find in the shower of bullets, but positioning is important. Even in something like Ikaruga, one of the best and toughest bullet hells on the planet, you can get through some of the gnarliest sprays of weapon fire. In Decks of Dexterity, you’re sometimes stuck no matter what you do.
The biggest reason is that bullets are too close together, and there’s not enough room in the arena to allow time for the bullets to separate to squeeze through. And in most bullet hells, you usually have enough view of the entire field to see where the bullets are coming from. This game fails with that, too. It feels like the developer found that people were too good at dodging bullets, so they made it occasionally impossible to do so. Once you’re hit, you immediately take your card turn, and you’re supposed to use your cards to get out of situations. I’m able to do that, but if there are no large green squares, you can’t take your turn again. So you’ll ping-pong between small green squares, teleporting around the map, eventually landing in an empty area, but there’s nothing else to latch onto, so you return to the bullet hell phase, and all the bullets are too close to dodge, so you take a hit. It’s nice you get your turn, but it’s unfair.
In theory, if I don’t have the card to escape, now the challenge is dodging all the bullets until I can find a large green square to take my turn. That’s fun. That’s tense. Instead, I’m punished for not drawing a card, and I have zero chance to dodge the bullets despite good positioning. Yes, there are cards that allow you to draw more cards, but it’s clear if that’s the case, decks become hyper-dependent on card draw, which works in Balatro, but doesn’t translate the need for damage, utility, and the dependency on finding large green squares on the field.
It’s terrible design.
On one hand, if a game has to go to those lengths to make it interesting and remove any skill, which is what a bullet hell is supposed to encourage, then maybe the concept doesn’t actually work. On the other hand, roguelites are meant to be punishing, but your skill should allow you to perform better than expected. That’s not an option here.
Decks of Dexterity functions as a concept, but its gameplay is completely broken.
Thank you for reading The Daily Demo! Did you play it? What’d you think of it? I’d love to hear your thoughts.