I find it pretty rare that when a game says it has a graphic novel art style, it actually does. There’s often just something that seems slightly off, like it’s not quite cut from the same cloth. I’m happy to say that’s not the case with Stack Order, a deck-building roguelike whose story is all about layering your cards to maximize their effects, as if you could find it in a hip, trendy French comic book store.
Where other deck builders may focus on the effects of individual cards, Stack Order is all about making your cards work in tandem with each other. In your casting area, you have a handful of fields. Some are devoted to defense cards, others to attack cards, and the last to ability cards. You can always see what your opponent is about to do, so it’s a matter of determining how you want to stack your cards in response to that.
Let’s say, for example, that your enemy is going to deal a lot of damage to you. You may want to load one of your defense zones with cards that will give you armor for that turn. The tradeoff to playing this pile is that you can only play all the cards you loaded into it, and if it’s a defense pile, that means you won’t do any damage. It would be the same vice versa with an offensive stack, meaning you want to make sure you’re doing a lot of damage so you don’t get caught on your opponent’s turn.
You also don’t want to randomly add cards to a pile. For example, there is an offensive card that deals an additional point of damage for each card activated before it in a stack. Get enough cards in this pile and you can do some serious damage. You can also add a card to a pile without playing that pile that turn, which means it’s also good to plan ahead. Each final decision feeds into another, making it a highly strategic moment.
And most importantly, Stack Order is simply beautiful. The linework is chunky, the character designs have an Adventure Time whimsy, the card art is simple but delightful, and there are these beautiful combat animations that are reminiscent of the Zelda CD-i games in as positive a way as you can interpret it (it should be very positive, in my eyes). I like it a lot! And if you’re interested and want to try the demo for yourself (or just want to), you can do so directly on Steam. here.
