Heretic's Fork

Most games that mix genres end up doing both halves badly. Heretic’s Fork does both halves well enough that the join mostly disappears.

Developer 9FingerGames and publisher Ravenage Games took three crowded genres and combined them into one tight, darkly funny package: roguelike deckbuilding, horde survival and tower defence. You play Hell’s newest hire, a manager brought in to fix a staffing crisis in the underworld: too many sinners, not enough punishment. Your job is to stop endless waves of the damned from escaping. Your tool is a deck-building “computer system” that rewires a single central tower into whatever kind of weapon your cards allow.

That premise matters because of when the game arrived. By its September 2023 Steam launch, the market was already crowded with Vampire Survivors imitators, and Slay the Spire‘s descendants were almost as common. Heretic’s Fork stands out by turning the deck into a system for designing your tower. You aren’t picking which attack to play this turn. Each card permanently rewires a machine that has to hold back wave after wave of enemies.

The game found an audience. A Nintendo Switch port followed in November 2024, and the Steam version has DLC, including “Inside The Fire.”

Its tone sets it apart as much as its systems do. The workplace satire is everywhere: performance-based pay, demon subordinates and the misery of a job that never ends. That gives it a personality most games in this genre never try for. It’s corporate satire with a pitchfork, and the joke holds up longer than expected.

• Deck-Driven Tower Engineering: Cards don’t trigger one-off actions. They permanently change your central tower, adding projectiles, area-of-effect zones, chained elemental damage and more. Your deck is effectively the tower’s design.
• Demon Subordinates: Before each shift you pick demon staff, and each one brings its own bonuses and playstyle. This pre-run choice shapes the build before you’ve drawn a single card.
• Perimeter Pressure: Sinners who slip through your kill zone head for the arena’s edges, so you have to watch the perimeter as well as rack up kills in the middle.
• Circles of Hell Progression: Difficulty climbs through the Circles of Hell, and each tier adds new modifiers and tougher enemies. It works as the game’s version of an ascension system.
• Performance-Based Pay: How much you earn depends on how well you run each shift, which ties the meta-progression neatly into the workplace satire.

The Gameplay Loop

Every roguelike depends on the moment a build clicks, and Heretic’s Fork is built around that moment. Early in a shift, your tower is a weak turret plinking at a trickle of sinners. By the late waves, if the draft has gone well, it’s firing chained elemental bolts, laying damage zones across the approaches and wiping out screen-filling crowds.

That rise from weak to overwhelming is the core of horde-survival games, but the deckbuilding layer changes how you think about it. In Vampire Survivors, you mostly react to the level-up screen. Here, every draft forces you to think about synergy. An elemental chain card is worth far more if you’ve already committed to spreading effects across a crowd. An area card is worth more if your projectile setup herds enemies into clusters. The design rewards a coherent plan and punishes greedy, unfocused picks. When a plan comes together and the tower is clearing the screen, the payoff is large and earned.

Strategic Depth Before the Shift

The demon subordinate system is where Heretic’s Fork gets past being a clever gimmick. Choosing your staff before a run is a real strategic decision, because each demon pushes you toward a different playstyle. It gives each run an identity before any cards are drawn, so runs don’t blur into the same RNG-driven draft over and over. It also fits the fiction: you’re a manager, and managers are judged by the teams they build.

Tension at the Perimeter

A single stationary tower could easily turn into a passive spectacle, where you draft cards and watch. The perimeter defence requirement keeps you involved. Sinners who leak through reach the edges of the arena, and failing to deal with them costs you. It’s a sensible fix for a structural weakness in stationary-defence designs. Attention always has to be split between building the engine and plugging the leaks.

Progression and Its Limits

The Circles of Hell structure provides the long-term goal, with new modifiers and harder enemies at each tier. It works as escalation, but it’s also where the game’s main weakness shows: repetition over long sessions and balance or difficulty spikes at higher Circles.

The repetition problem comes from the design itself. A central tower in a fixed arena means the basic scene rarely changes: you in the middle, sinners pouring in from the edges. Card variety and demon combinations keep builds fresh, but the setting doesn’t change enough to hide the loop the way games with shifting maps and biomes can. After many shifts, the arena starts to feel like an office cubicle, which may be the satire working a little too well.

The difficulty spikes are a more practical problem. In a roguelike, a wall at a higher tier feels fair if it demands better play and unfair if it demands a narrow, specific build. Heretic’s Fork sometimes drifts toward the second case, where a Circle seems to punish an otherwise sound deck for missing one answer. It isn’t a dealbreaker, but it wears on patience late in the game.

Writing and Tone

The satirical workplace humour deserves real credit. Performance-linked pay, managing demon staff and bureaucratizing eternal damnation could all have been a one-note joke. Instead, the humour holds the game together. It explains why you’re doing what you’re doing and gives the grind a knowing wink. Plenty of games in this genre have no personality at all. Heretic’s Fork has plenty.

The art matches the tone: dark, infernal and sardonic without drifting into edgy excess. What matters most is readability. A horde-survival game lives or dies on whether you can follow the chaos, and Heretic’s Fork is designed to keep its screen-filling crowds and layered effects legible.

The UI carries the “computer system” metaphor, framing the deck as hellish enterprise software, which extends the joke into the menus. It’s a smart choice, even if some card-management screens are built for small catalogs and get crowded as the deck grows between waves.

Performance is the pressure point for any game in this genre. A 2D game of this scope is light on hardware by design, but the late-run moments with maximum enemies and effects are where weaker systems will struggle first.

Steam (PC): This is the fullest version. Mouse and keyboard suit the card management and menus, and the PC release is where the DLC, including “Inside The Fire,” is available. It also has the longest track record: launched in September 2023.

Nintendo Switch: The November 2024 port fits the genre well. Short, self-contained shifts are ideal for handheld play, and “one more run” works just as well on a couch or a commute as at a desk. The trade-offs are the usual ones for Switch. Controller-driven card navigation is less precise than a mouse, and dense late-game effects put more strain on the hardware and on a small screen. Switch players should also check which DLC is available before assuming it matches the Steam version.

Heretic’s Fork understands something many genre hybrids miss: the combination has to create a new decision, not just stack two familiar ones. Making the deck the design of your tower does that. Every card is a commitment, every demon subordinate points you toward a strategy, and the late-run payoff of a finished engine clearing the screen is a real draw.

It isn’t flawless. The fixed arena can’t fully hide the loop over long sessions, and the higher Circles sometimes test your luck in the draft more than your skill. But 9FingerGames has built something with real identity, mechanical intelligence and a sense of humour that carries it further than its structure alone would. For players who enjoy watching a well-planned machine do its work, it’s a recommendation — with the caveat that the repetition sets in eventually.