Iris and the Giant

Most deckbuilders want to be Slay the Spire. Iris and the Giant wants to be a diary entry that happens to have combat in it, and that difference shows up in every design decision Rigaud made.

This is a solo project, and it’s built like one — in the good sense. There’s no committee here, no monetization team softening the edges, no live-ops calendar demanding return visits. It’s a tactical roguelike deckbuilder that fuses collectible-card mechanics with RPG progression and a run-based structure, and the whole apparatus exists to serve a single premise: Iris, a young woman, descends through the landscape of her own imagination to face down the fears and doubts that have taken monstrous shape, all the way to the Giant raging at the bottom.

The mental-health metaphor is the part that could have gone catastrophically wrong. Games have a long, embarrassing history of using depression as set dressing — a gray filter, a sad piano, a boss named Anxiety. Rigaud does something harder and smarter: he encodes it in the resource economy. Your cards are your capacity to act, and when they run out, you’re done, no matter how much health you’re sitting on. Anyone who has watched their own energy drain out from under them while everything technically looked fine will recognize the feeling immediately. That’s not decoration. That’s design carrying the theme.

Market-wise, this occupies an awkward and honorable niche. It arrived into a genre already crowded with mechanically deeper competitors, and it doesn’t try to out-complexity them. Its pitch is compactness and tone — a lean pool of unlockable cards, runs that don’t overstay their welcome, a minimalist visual language that reads instantly. The Switch version was well received by outlets. The iOS version is where this story turns ugly, and we’ll get there. The Android version has been pulled from Google Play entirely.

• Lane-based vertical combat: Enemies advance toward you in columns on a vertical board. You spend a hand each turn to strike, block, or manipulate the field. Positioning matters as much as raw numbers — a lane you ignore this turn is a lane that reaches you next turn.
• Card attrition as the real health bar: Running out of cards kills you just as dead as running out of HP. This inverts the standard deckbuilder relationship with your deck: cards are ammunition, not an engine.
• Specialization-rewarding deckbuilding: The game actively punishes hoarding. Committing to a playstyle beats taking everything on offer — a discipline most deckbuilders only pretend to enforce.
• Persistent meta-progression: Points earned across runs permanently boost Iris, and the card pool unlocks over time. Failure compounds into capability.
• Recoverable memory fragments: Between battles you collect pieces of Iris’ past, which gradually explain the real-world reasons for the descent. The narrative is loot.
• Eight-language localization, single-player only. No multiplayer, no co-op, no pretense otherwise.

The Gameplay Loop

The core turn looks simple at first. You have a hand. Enemies are stacked in columns above you, marching down. You play cards to kill them, blunt them, or reshape the board. Then they move.

What makes it sing is the double-jeopardy resource model. In most deckbuilders, your deck is a renewable engine — it shuffles, it cycles, it comes back. Here, cards are finite. Every strike you throw is a strike you don’t have later. So the tactical question stops being “what’s my optimal play this turn” and becomes “what’s the cheapest way to survive this turn so I still have something left for the next one.” That’s a fundamentally different, more anxious calculus, and it’s the single best idea in the game.

It also means the failure states are legible. Losses rarely come down to a dice roll; they come from spending too freely eleven turns ago, with the debt accumulating in real time. That’s the mark of a well-tuned roguelike: the death is instructive.

The lane system deserves credit too. Because enemies come in columns, threat is spatial rather than abstract. You can see the pressure building in a specific place. Deciding to let a lane fester while you clear another is a real, tense choice with a visible price. It gives the combat a physicality that pure numbers-on-cards designs never achieve.

Where the Depth Runs Out

Here’s the honest part. This is not a game with a thousand-hour tail. The most common criticism from otherwise enthusiastic Steam reviewers is limited long-term depth and fairly short run length. Those complaints are correct.

The card pool is lean. Once the two or three archetypes the specialization system nudges you toward are internalized, the strategic space compresses fast. The difficulty curve is genuinely well-graded — accessible enough that newcomers to the genre won’t bounce, demanding enough that veterans have to actually play well — but a good curve isn’t the same as an inexhaustible one. There’s a ceiling, and it arrives.

We’d argue this is a feature more than a bug, and the reason is the story. The memory fragments give this thing a destination. Endless roguelikes are all middle; Iris has an ending, and the ending is the point. Judging it against a genre built for infinite replay is a category error. It’s a compact experience that respects your time and then lets you go. That’s not a failure of ambition. That’s a different ambition.

But if you’re buying this expecting Monster Train’s build-crafting depth or Balatro’s numeric absurdity, you’ll be disappointed, and you should know that before you spend your $5.99.

Onboarding and Readability

Rigaud nails the thing most indie deckbuilders fumble: teaching without tutorializing. The board state is readable at a glance. Card effects are terse. There’s no wiki-diving, no keyword salad, no forty-minute explainer video required before turn one. The onboarding friction is near zero, and it achieves that without dumbing down the tactics. That’s hard to pull off, and it’s the strongest evidence that a single designer with a clear vision beats a large team with a feature list.

The art direction is the hook, and it earns the attention.

This is minimalism with a purpose, not minimalism as a budget excuse. Flat shapes, restrained palette, high-contrast silhouettes — the visual language does double duty as UI. You read threat, position, and state instantly because there’s nothing else on screen competing for your eye. Form and function agree, which is rarer than it should be.

It’s also emotionally calibrated. The starkness reads as loneliness without ever announcing itself. Nobody had to write a line of dialogue explaining that Iris feels small. The composition does it.

On the hardware side, a game of flat shapes and turn-based logic is light on any machine it targets. On iOS, though, the port is a catastrophe, and we’re not softening that. More below.

Three platforms, three very different products. This is the part of the review that should decide your purchase.

Steam — the definitive version. Mouse-and-keyboard suits a game about deliberate, considered card placement. Precise clicks on a dense lane board, no fat-finger risk, no misread taps. This is where the game is what Rigaud intended.

Nintendo Switch — the right vibe. Handheld is arguably the ideal context for a contemplative, run-based game about a young woman’s interior life. Outlets received this version well. If you want to play this in bed at midnight, which is frankly where it belongs, this is your version.

iOS — do not buy this. Caution is warranted, because the sample is small: 3.7 out of 5 from just ten ratings. Ten ratings is not a statistical verdict. But the content of those reviews is damning in a way the number isn’t, because the failures reported are structural, not matters of taste. Users report in-app purchase loading failures requiring app restarts. Freezes during cinematics. White-screen glitches. And worst of all, an end-game softlock: the moment Iris hugs the Giant — the emotional payoff the entire game has been walking toward — the game reportedly gets stuck.

Read that again. The port breaks at the ending. Whatever you think about touch controls on a lane-based tactics board (they’re fine, in principle — the board is chunky enough for fingers), a build that can’t reliably deliver its own climax is not a shippable product. And the Android version being delisted from Google Play suggests mobile has been a losing battle for a one-person studio that probably should never have been fighting it.

This isn’t said to pile on a solo developer. It’s said because someone will read this review, buy the wrong version for $5.99, and have the actual experience ruined at exactly the wrong moment.

Iris and the Giant is a small game that does one big thing better than its more elaborate competitors: it makes you feel its subject through the rules, not the script. The finite-card economy is an original idea in a genre that mostly iterates on the same engine-building template, and the minimalist presentation is disciplined rather than cheap. Rigaud clearly knew exactly what he was making, and he made it.

Its limits are real. The strategic ceiling is low, the runs are short, and there’s no reason to keep playing once the story closes. We don’t hold that against it — a game that ends on purpose is a choice, and an increasingly countercultural one — but you’re buying an experience, not a hobby.

The mobile situation is what keeps this out of the top tier. A game whose entire meaning lives in its final scene cannot ship a version that reportedly locks up during that scene. On Steam and Switch, we recommend it to players who want a compact, emotionally intelligent roguelike and don’t need infinite replay. On iOS, it’s an unfinished port of a finished game, and no amount of good design upstream fixes that.

Buy it on the right platform. Then let it go when it’s over. That’s what it wants.