Roguebook

Every roguelike deckbuilder since Slay the Spire has whispered the same commandment into your ear: thin your deck. Cut the chaff. Fewer cards mean tighter draws, cleaner combos, more consistency. It’s gospel. Roguebook heard that gospel, shrugged, and built a game around doing the exact opposite.

Developed by Abrakam Entertainment, a Belgian studio with real pedigree in this space—they made the underrated online card battler Faeria—Roguebook arrives with a co-designer whose name carries genuine weight: Richard Garfield, the mathematician who invented Magic: The Gathering and, in doing so, invented the entire trading card game as a commercial category. That’s not marketing garnish. Garfield’s fingerprints are visible in the game’s central provocation, which is that a bigger deck should be a strength, not a liability.

The setup is charming without overstaying its welcome. You and a duo of heroes are trapped inside a sentient magical book—the Roguebook—and clawing your way toward the exit means fighting through procedurally arranged pages of the fantasy world of Faeria. It’s a framing device, sure, but it earns its keep by justifying the game’s storybook aesthetic and its most novel exploration mechanic.

Market-wise, Roguebook slots into a crowded, brutally competitive shelf. It launched to a warm critical reception—it sits at a 78 on Metacritic—and occupies the upper-middle tier of the genre: not the cultural juggernaut Spire became, but a smarter, more distinctive game than its modest profile suggests. It’s the kind of title genre veterans recommend to each other in hushed, knowing tones. The question is whether its ambition survives contact with its own progression systems. Mostly, it does.

• Dual-Hero Positioning Combat: You field two heroes at once—one on the front line absorbing punishment, one in the back setting up damage. Cards swap their positions, and swapping is where the game lives.
• Deck Expansion as Power: Growing your deck past size thresholds unlocks permanent talent-tree gems, turning card bloat from a punishment into a deliberate strategy.
• Ink-and-Brush Fog Exploration: A hexagonal map hidden under fog. You spend collected inks to paint tiles and reveal what’s around you—merchants, relics, elite fights—making map discovery an active resource decision rather than a passive stroll.

The Gameplay Loop

Combat is the heart, and the dual-hero system is what separates Roguebook from the pack. At any moment one hero is in front, one is behind. The front hero takes the hits; the back hero is protected but often has abilities that only fire from safety. Many cards swap the two heroes’ positions when played, which means every turn becomes a small puzzle of sequencing: play the swap card now to shove your fragile mage to the back, or hold it to detonate a combo that keys off the swap itself?

This turns positioning into a live, tactile variable. In most deckbuilders, targeting is a solved problem—you hit the enemy, or you don’t. Here, who is standing where changes what your cards even do. It’s a genuinely fresh tactical layer, and once it clicks, the standard single-avatar deckbuilder starts to feel oddly flat by comparison.

Then there’s the deck-size heresy. Conventional wisdom says a bloated deck dilutes your good cards. Roguebook counters with the talent-tree gem system: cross certain deck-size breakpoints and you permanently upgrade your heroes with passive bonuses. Suddenly, that extra card isn’t dead weight—it’s progress toward a tangible power spike. The tension is delicious. You want to grab more cards, but each one risks watering down your engine. It reframes the core deckbuilding decision instead of just re-skinning it. This is the Garfield influence at its most legible, and it’s the game’s single best idea.

Exploration and Interface

Between fights, you navigate a fog-shrouded hex map, and this is Roguebook’s second clever swing. You don’t automatically see your options. You paint the map using inks and brushes—consumable resources—to peel back the fog and expose tiles. Reveal a merchant here, a relic there, an elite guarding a treasure over there. Do you spend your ink pushing toward that shiny relic, or conserve it? Exploration becomes an economy, and it rewards the greedy and the bold. It’s a smart antidote to the “pick one of two nodes” tedium that plagues lesser roguelikes.

The interface is built to serve all this. Card text is clear, iconography is legible on desktop, and the flow from map to combat to reward is designed to stay quick. The reservations here are situational rather than structural—the Switch gets its own section below.

Where the Loop Frays

The friction shows up in metaprogression. Failed runs earn currency you spend on permanent upgrades, and those upgrades gate your access to the harder Epilogue difficulties. In principle, fine—that’s the roguelike bargain. In practice, the grind is padded. Runs are long, and losing a lengthy run to inch a meta-bar forward tests patience in a way the tighter, faster loops of its competitors do not. The early hours are exhilarating; the mid-game march toward the Epilogue can feel like homework. It’s the difference between a game that respects your time and one that occasionally rents it back to you.

Roguebook is beautiful, and it earns the word. The hand-drawn, storybook art direction is warm and painterly, all rich inks and illustrated flourishes that lean into the “trapped in a magical book” conceit. Enemies have character; the world of Faeria has a lush, watercolor identity that most deckbuilders—usually content with functional card art and a flat backdrop—never bother to attempt. This is a game with a visual point of view.

As a turn-based card game of this scope, Roguebook is light on hardware demands, and the design leans into that: the animation work on card play and hero swaps is snappy without being showy—exactly the right restraint for a game where you’ll play thousands of cards.

On Steam, Roguebook is at its best. Mouse-and-keyboard input suits the game’s core interactions perfectly: dragging cards, reading dense tooltips, scanning a full hex map at a glance. The high-resolution art has room to breathe. If you’re buying one version, buy this one.

The Nintendo Switch port is a more mixed proposition. The pick-up-and-play, one-more-run rhythm is a natural fit for handheld and the couch, and controller navigation is competent. But the game’s information density fights the smaller screen. Card text and UI elements get cramped in handheld mode, and reading fine print on relics and cards can strain the eyes—a real problem in a game that demands you parse a lot of text before every decision. Docked, it’s much better. Handheld, keep it close to your face.

Roguebook is what happens when smart designers refuse to copy the template. The dual-hero swap combat and the greed-rewarding deck expansion are the kind of ideas most studios wouldn’t risk, and Abrakam pulls both off with the confidence of a team that knows exactly why these mechanics matter. When Roguebook is firing—two heroes flipping positions to chain a lethal combo while you weigh whether to paint one more fog tile—it’s one of the more inventive deckbuilders on the market.

It’s held back by a metaprogression loop that mistakes length for depth, and by a Switch port that asks too much of a small screen. Neither flaw is fatal. Both are the kind of thing a patient player learns to route around. What’s left is a distinctive, gorgeous, tactically deep card game that we recommend to genre veterans willing to tolerate its grind—at $24.99 on Steam, it’s a solid buy for the right audience, and a pleasure to watch a genre’s iron rule get rewritten in ink.