Twisted Ankle

As someone who plays a lot of card games, both physical and digital, it has been a shame to see the latter lean so heavily into roguelikes. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy procedural generation as much as the next guy who writes for a game website, but there’s something to be said for permanent progression, you know? I like making long term decisions, selecting powerful cards, and improving both the depth and breadth of my options over time instead of resetting every hour or so. So when I was checking out turn-based games during a recent Steam fest and came across Street Shuffle it seemed like a match made in Vegas. It strongly reminded me of my beloved Card City Nights, but for the post-Slay the Spire world, and that’s a strong enough pitch to sell me a ticket. It’s unfortunate, then, that about 1/3 into the show Street Shuffle proceeded to bust its ass and writhe on the pavement like Peter Griffin for the remainder of its runtime. I almost feel guilty for sitting through the whole thing, though in my defense I figured it was eventually going to get up and shout “The Aristocrats!” or something.

Regrettably my criticisms start at the game’s presentation. Not the visuals or music, those are fine. My gripe is with the core concept of warring street performers barely being utilized. From a thematic perspective I was excited to outperform enemy crews and get the crowd on your side in lieu of combat, but the mechanics betray this by having almost nothing to do with buskers doing their routines and everything to do with armor, poison, exhaustion, rage, and every other type of status effect that I don’t even need to explain because you’ve already played a game that does these exact things. The characters don’t even know what they’re doing, with some talking about how they’re doing dance moves one moment and straight up saying they’ve been throwin’ bows the next. The game forgets what it just did so often that I suspect it’s nursing an untreated concussion from the aforementioned performance incident.

Street Shuffle does have some cool mechanical concepts I haven’t quite seen implemented in other games of its ilk. The main hook is its draft. Each of your party members contributes a certain number of cards from their unique deck each turn and allows you to pick some for your hand. This allows for a surprising amount of control, as well as recursion of your combos far quicker than many digital deckbuilders manage. That’s not to say that you won’t sometimes hope combo pieces line up in the right order or show up at the same time, but your odds are significantly better, and that’s nice! What stands out as odd is that the main character is not afforded a draft like the others, and in the writing biz that’s what we call a segue.

The most striking thing about the troupe is that our main character, Ace, is the clear and obvious weak link. I can’t name many games, RPGs or otherwise, where the lead is by far the worst member of their own party. There is no aspect of the game Ace is comparable at, much less best at. Ace gets random draws instead of drafting. Ace’s cards prominently feature some form of randomized effect, the best outcomes of which never outweigh their downsides (we’re talking game loss-worthy penalties).  While everyone else goes off the rails towards endgame, Ace’s cards offer nothing that scales worth a damn. Every level up Ace got felt like I was being penalized for raising their max health by having to take yet another crappy card. They were still so incredibly weak by endgame that I found myself wondering why their party members were even bothering to follow them in the first place. And then it occurred to me; that’s not a shared lifebar. Ace’s job isn’t to lead by example, it’s to play meatshield and get their ass beat by every last street performer in Dunkopolis while everyone else looks pretty.

The difficulty curve of this entire experience is a roller coaster. I’ll confess that this is partially my fault, as I focused on leveling Ace early not realizing that their cardpool contained exactly zero win conditions, but I won’t belabor that point any further for now. Early fights are manageable, followed by midgame ones that you need to tackle in a very specific order lest you risk hitting the wall. Repeated missions give minimal XP so grinding isn’t an effective option. Once you get past that, it’s a high speed downhill power trip aside from a mildly challenging second-to-last fight jostling you just before the ride comes to a complete stop.

Much of the above could be forgiven, or at least mitigated, if the fights remained interesting across the entire game’s runtime. This is not achieved, and I can tell you exactly why: this game has 3 enemy types. Three. Clowns that support, Singers that swing, and Musicians that defend. You’ve presented this city that’s allegedly full to bursting with street performing weirdos and you couldn’t think of a single other type of busker? They receive numeric tweaks for each palette swap as you progress through the game, and occasionally get a new move, but are never altered to the point where they’ll surprise you. There are also 4 bosses, 3 of which you will refight several times throughout the story, because there is no content in Street Shuffle that is not repeated until you are sick of it.

The living statue boss exemplifies some of the worst design Street Shuffle has to offer, which is not to say it’s challenging! What it tests is your patience. This boss’ whole deal is uncapped shield gains that don’t clear after each turn, which often outpaces your capacity for damage. On refights she also starts exhausting your characters so they don’t get turns, stalling your combos out and slowing you down even further. There’s a very specific card Gem can take that effectively circumvents armor, but what it doesn’t do is make beating this boss take less time, as it means every other turn is effectively dead beyond building your own defenses. In one of my first encounters with her I literally left the fight after about 20 turns to go do all other ones I had access to first, not because I was losing, but because both of us were stuck at full health with no ability to so much as scratch the other side. Rarely have I seen a deckbuilder, roguelike or otherwise, where an enemy that technically scales forever couldn’t close a game out.

What’s worse is that the lategame starts to put you in situations that go even further to eliminate your agency. One particular fight casts a status effect that completely shuts off the draft! You know, the core mechanic that differentiated Street Shuffle? It just deals you cards instead. Cool! Awesome! I hated making choices. Thank goodness you’re likely to be overwhelmingly powerful at this point, but if this was intended to feel like a victory lap it sure didn’t feel like one.

Spoilers for the endgame, skip this paragraph if that’s a concern you still have: The actual final opponent has a persistent passive where they get to play all of your cards that you couldn’t afford to. In any other game this would have the potential to be brutal, forcing you to make suboptimal plays in order to not cause your own demise. Except the joke’s on them, I just gave them Ace’s shit-ass cards! The main character is so useless that I was able to hand almost every one of their cards to the boss and not move the needle a millimeter in their favor. I beat this fight on my first attempt.

Even talking about Street Shuffle is frustrating, because despite all of my griping I do see a kernel of a good idea at its core. The draft, the funky card effects, the various builds you can lean into in new playthroughs, hell just the vibe it so desperately wants to achieve! A game like this could work, should work. Unfortunately there just isn’t a single reason to recommend it over any number of other card battlers, and my god do you have plenty to choose from just this year alone. This is one act you can walk right past without dropping your change in its cup.

Ah shit, I think Koko stole my wallet. Time to cancel my cards.

4/10