Across the Obelisk

For years, the deck-building roguelite has been a solitary pursuit: lone ironclads or silent hunters, carefully pruning a single deck to survive a gauntlet of randomized horrors. Dreamsite Games—under the publishing wing of Paradox Interactive—decided that the “lone wolf” approach was ripe for disruption. The result is Across the Obelisk, a sprawling, cooperative RPG that takes the familiar card-driven combat of Slay the Spire and grafts it onto the skeleton of a traditional four-person adventuring party.

Set in the vibrant yet fractured realm of Senenthia, the narrative is classic fantasy fare: a princess is missing, an ancient Obelisk is acting up, and a motley crew of warriors, mages, rogues, and clerics are the only ones standing between order and total corruption. But the story is merely a coat of paint for one of the most mechanically dense strategy games on the market. You are managing an ecosystem of four heroes, not just a hand of cards. Every run requires you to balance the needs of four distinct heroes, each with their own specialized decks, equipment slots, and talent trees.

Played solo—controlling all four characters yourself—or in 1–4 player co-op, the game demands a level of tactical coordination that puts its peers to shame. This isn’t a game you pick up for a quick fifteen-minute break between meetings. It is a commitment. By expanding the scope from a single protagonist to a full squad, Dreamsite has created a product that feels less like a quick “run” and more like a condensed D&D campaign, complete with branching maps, narrative choices, and a meta-progression system that is as rewarding as it is demanding.

• Four-Hero Party Synergy: Unlike most deck-builders, you control (or coordinate) four distinct classes simultaneously, requiring cards to play off each other’s buffs and debuffs.
• Cooperative Play: Friends can drop in and take command of individual heroes in real-time, sharing resources and strategy.
• Deep Meta-Progression: Between runs, players upgrade their town and hero perks, ensuring that even a total party wipe provides meaningful progress toward the next attempt.

The Complexity of Coordination

The “Aha!” moment in Across the Obelisk doesn’t come from drawing a single powerful card; it comes from realizing how a Warrior’s “Taunt” can set up a Mage’s “Fireball” while a Cleric prepares a “Sanctuary” for the following turn. This is archetypal synergy at its most refined. Because you are always dealing with a party of four, the game introduces a layer of cognitive load that single-character roguelites lack. You have to track four energy pools, four discard piles, and the status effects of an entire battlefield.

The depth here is considerable. With a large roster of unlockable characters and hundreds of cards, the build variety is functionally infinite. You might build your Rogue as a poison-stacking assassin in one run and a high-evasion utility support in the next. The game rewards this experimentation, but it also punishes sloppy planning. If your deck-thinning isn’t synchronized across the party, you’ll find your healer drawing nothing but dead cards when your tank is one hit away from the graveyard.

The Marathon Problem

While the strategic depth is a genuine strength, it comes at a significant cost: time. A successful run in Across the Obelisk can stretch across an entire evening—a radical departure from the short loops the genre is known for. The game attempts to mitigate this with a “Madness” difficulty system and an “Obelisk Mode” for faster play, but the core campaign remains a slog.

This length creates a friction point for the cooperative experience. Finding three friends who can commit to a multi-hour block of uninterrupted tactical combat is a tall order. The game saves progress, allowing you to stop and start, but the momentum of a well-oiled deck often dissipates when play is split across multiple days. Furthermore, the early-game grind is real. Until you’ve invested enough in the town upgrades and perk trees, certain biomes feel mathematically insurmountable, forcing a “lose-to-win” loop that might frustrate those looking for a more skill-reliant onboarding process.

The Economy of Senenthia

The Paradox influence also deserves attention. The game is solid, but it is already being surrounded by a constellation of DLC packs. While the base game is feature-complete, the constant prompts for unowned content and the fact that some of the most interesting characters are locked behind additional paywalls can leave a sour taste. It’s a familiar model for Paradox fans, but it feels particularly aggressive in a genre where “everything in the box” is the standard.

Despite these gripes, the core loop is compelling. The branching narrative map offers genuine agency; choosing to travel through the frozen wastes of the north instead of the swampy south fundamentally alters the types of enemies you face and the equipment you’ll find. This keeps the later hours of a run feeling as tense as the first.

Visually, the game opts for a clean, colorful, and slightly “mobile-adjacent” aesthetic. It isn’t going to win awards for artistic innovation, but the UI design is a triumph of information density. Managing four decks and a dozen status effects could have been a nightmare, yet the interface is built to stay readable even when the screen is crowded with icons. As a 2D game of this scope, it is also light on hardware, and high resolutions should pose no challenge on a typical PC.

On PC (Steam), the game is in its natural habitat. The precision of a mouse makes managing dense menus and card descriptions a breeze. The Nintendo Switch port, however, is a mixed bag. The portability suits chipping away at the meta-progression grind during a commute, but the UI is designed for larger screens, and dense text becomes a squint-inducing challenge in handheld mode. If you have the choice, the PC version is the definitive way to play.

Across the Obelisk is a bold evolution of the roguelite formula. It successfully translates the social and tactical complexity of a full RPG party into a card-driven format. While its punishing session lengths, grindy early game, and DLC-heavy economy hold it back, those willing to invest the time will find a strategy experience of rare depth. It is a solid, occasionally exhausting take on what happens when you stop thinking about the hero and start thinking about the team—one we recommend to the right audience.