Ancient Enemy

There is a particular kind of game that shouldn’t work. Take a solitaire variant most people have never consciously chosen to play — golf solitaire, the one where you clear a tableau by picking cards one rank above or below the one in your hand — and bolt an RPG onto it. Suits become damage types. Chain length becomes a damage multiplier. A run of seven cards isn’t a satisfying little dopamine hit; it’s a fireball that ends an encounter.

Ancient Enemy works. Mostly.

Grey Alien Games is not a newcomer to this trick. The Bournemouth studio has been mining the space between casual card games and real mechanical depth for years — most notably with Shadowhand, a highwaywoman-themed solitaire RPG that many of the studio’s own players still consider the better game. Ancient Enemy is the follow-up, released April 9, 2020 at $16.99 on Steam, and it comes with two collaborators who matter: Scottish artist Jen Pattison, whose hand-painted, desaturated ruin-scapes give the game its entire identity, and writer Jim Rossignol — a name that will register with anyone who read PC gaming criticism in the 2000s, and who co-founded Big Robot (Sir, You Are Being Hunted).

The premise is post-apocalyptic fantasy with the apocalypse already over. You are a fallen sorcerer walking through a world where evil won. There’s no prophecy, no chosen one, no rally. You scavenge power from a scarred landscape and get slightly less weak. It’s an intriguing framing, and — this is the first real problem — the game does almost nothing with it.

Market position is clear enough: this is a premium indie card battler that predates the great Slay-the-Spire-clone flood but competes in its shadow. The design is the achievement. It’s the profile of a game that delights the people who buy it and doesn’t get bought by very many — which tells you most of what you need to know about how to approach it.

• Suit-Gated Combat Tableau: Three suits map to three actions — physical attack, magic attack, defense. Every card you clear charges the corresponding meter. You aren’t clearing the board for points; you’re deciding, card by card, whether this turn is offense or survival.
• Chain-Length Scaling: Damage scales with combo length, not card count. A four-chain and four separate single clears are wildly different outcomes. This single rule does the heavy lifting of turning solitaire into strategy.
• Pre-Encounter Loadout Swapping: Spells, passive abilities and items are purchased with earned resources and — critically — swapped between fights. Enemy resistances and immunities are known quantities you counter-build against, not surprises you eat.
• Branching Overworld with Risk/Reward Routing: Eleven chapters across dozens of hand-painted levels, with optional detours and puzzle nodes. You choose how much risk to absorb for resources.
• Three Difficulty Tiers: From relaxed to nightmare. The spread is real — the top tier is not decorative.
• 17 achievements, Steam trading cards. Present. Unremarkable.

The Gameplay Loop

The game’s best stretch comes early, once the solitaire board stops looking like a solitaire board and starts looking like a resource-allocation puzzle with a timer.

Here’s the tension the design engineers. The tableau offers you a path. Following the longest available chain feels correct — long chains mean big damage. But the longest chain might run through three cards of the wrong suit, charging your magic meter when the thing in front of you is immune to magic. Meanwhile a shorter chain through the right suit deals less raw damage but lands. And every card you take is a card removed from the board that a later chain might have needed.

That’s a real decision. It recurs several times per turn. It’s the whole game, and for a good long while it’s excellent.

The loadout layer is what makes the game tactical. Because you swap spells and abilities before each encounter with full knowledge of what you’re facing, Ancient Enemy is a preparation game as much as an execution game. An enemy immune to physical damage isn’t a wall — it’s a prompt to restructure your kit around magic scaling and pull passives that reward specific chain lengths. This is where the accusation of “it’s just a luck game” collapses. The board is random. Your answer to the board is not.

The branching map extends that logic outward. Detours cost health or risk a harder fight and pay in resources that become build power. Puzzle nodes break the combat rhythm. Routing is a real strategic layer, if a light one.

Where It Stalls

Now the criticism, and it’s the obvious one: the game shows you everything it has by the midpoint.

By chapter five or six, the mechanical vocabulary is complete. New enemies arrive, but they’re recombinations — different resistance profiles, different damage numbers, same conversation. There’s no second-act rule change, no mechanic that inverts what you learned. Eleven chapters is roughly four chapters longer than the design can carry.

The deeper structural issue is more damning, and it’s the one to fix first: enemies never touch your tableau. They hit you. They resist your damage types. But they do not shuffle your board, lock a suit, seed dead cards, or force you to clear in a specific order. The solitaire layer and the RPG layer sit adjacent to each other rather than interlocking. Compare this to what Slay the Spire does with intent telegraphing and status effects that corrupt your deck — the enemy is a participant in your system. Here the enemy is a wall with hit points and a preference. Every fight is you against the shuffle, with a health bar watching.

And the story — the thing you’d expect a Rossignol-credited game to lead with — barely exists. The world is described beautifully in fragments and then declines to go anywhere. There’s setting here, and real atmosphere, but no narrative arc worth the name. For a game whose entire hook is “what happens after the villain wins,” that’s a missed opportunity of the first order.

The Replay Problem

There is no New Game+ and no free-play mode. Once the campaign ends, the game is over. No endless tableau, no daily challenge, no build-experimentation sandbox — nothing to catch a player who has just learned an interesting combat system and wants to keep using it.

For a game built on a mechanic that is endlessly replayable in principle, this is close to malpractice. The scaffolding exists. Difficulty tiers give you a reason for a second run, and a nightmare run is meaningfully different. But that’s a replay of the same content, not a reason to stay.

Jen Pattison’s art is the reason this game is remembered rather than merely rated.

The palette is muted, bruised, and confident — ash greys, dried-blood reds, sickly greens — and the hand-painted backdrops sell the “evil already won” premise more effectively than any of the writing does. Each level is a distinct painted scene, and there’s real craft in how the ruined landscapes escalate. The soundtrack matches: sparse, low, atmospheric, content to sit under the play rather than perform.

The UI is the quiet triumph. Card-game interfaces live or die on legibility, and this one is built clean. Suit-to-action mapping is readable at a glance, meters are always visible, chain state is unambiguous. That sounds like a low bar. Most card games in this space clear it badly.

Technically, there’s little to worry about: this is a 2D card game from a studio that has shipped a dozen of them, and a game of this scope is light on hardware. Grey Alien also has a reputation — visible throughout the Steam discussions — for unusually responsive developer support. That counts.

Steam, mouse and keyboard. This is the right and native home for it.

Ancient Enemy is a point-and-click game with zero reflex demand, which means the mouse is doing exactly what it was made for: precise selection, no latency pressure, no dexterity tax. Nothing about the input design gets in your way.

The absence worth naming is that this design is screaming for a touchscreen. Tapping a chain on a tablet is the ideal expression of this interaction model, and the game’s turn-based, pause-anywhere structure is tailor-made for short sessions. Grey Alien’s catalogue has historically reached mobile; the Steam-centric release here means the game lives in the wrong room. On a desktop it competes with everything. On a tablet it would have no competition at all.

Steam Deck is the partial fix — a game this undemanding on a handheld, with trackpad input, is a decent approximation of the tablet experience it deserved.

Ancient Enemy is an inventive game that stops inventing too early, and the second half doesn’t earn the first.

The core idea is strong. Mapping suits to combat actions and scaling damage by chain length is the kind of elegant, load-bearing mechanic most studios never find, and the pre-fight loadout system builds real tactical texture on top of it. Pattison’s art gives it a presence far beyond its budget.

But a great mechanic is a foundation, not a building. The enemies never learn to fight your board. The story never arrives. The campaign overstays by a third. And when it’s done, the door locks behind you — no New Game+, no endless mode, nothing to do with the skill you just acquired.

For solitaire devotees and art-first players, there’s something here worth a discounted purchase. For most people, the back half’s repetition and the total absence of replay structure make it hard to recommend. Wait for a sale, play in short sittings, and stop when it stops surprising you — the game won’t mind, and the impression you leave with will be better than the credits deserve.