SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech

Image & Form Games has spent years doing something most studios can’t manage once: reinventing itself with every release while keeping a single fictional universe coherent. The SteamWorld series has already been a tower-defense mining game, a Metroidvania digging sim, and a turn-based tactics-meets-XCOM western. SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech, published by Thunderful Publishing and available on Nintendo platforms, Steam, and iOS, is the Swedish studio’s swing at the RPG — filtered, naturally, through a mechanic that was white-hot at the time: deck-building.

That timing matters. Quest arrived in the shadow of Slay the Spire, when every publisher was bolting cards onto anything that moved. The cynical read was that Image & Form had chased a trend. The actual game refutes that. Where most deck-builders of the era were roguelikes — procedural, run-based, disposable — Quest is a structured, authored RPG with a party, a plot, equipment, crafting, and hand-drawn chapters you move through like pages in a storybook. The cards aren’t the game; they’re the verb system.

You play as Armilly, a would-be hero with guild aspirations and no guild acceptance letter, alongside her alchemist friend Copernica and a rotating cast of steam-driven robots. The tone is classic Image & Form: fantasy tropes played straight enough to work, then punctured with self-aware steampunk humor. The App Store reception — 4.4 out of 5 from 115 ratings — suggests the core holds up with the audience that matters most for a premium mobile port.

• Punch-card combat: Each hero contributes 8 cards to a shared deck of 24. Every turn you play three cards from a hand of six — strikes build steam pressure, spells and abilities spend it. It’s a resource economy disguised as a card game.
• Hero chains: Play three cards from the same character in one turn and you trigger a bonus effect determined by their equipped weapon. This single rule transforms deck construction from “pick good cards” into “engineer probable combos.”
• Over 100 craftable cards: Cards are collected, crafted, and upgraded with materials rather than drafted from random rewards — you build toward a strategy deliberately, not opportunistically.
• Ranked chapters and an optional arena: Each chapter grades your performance, and a colosseum offers gauntlet fights that stress-test your deck far beyond what the campaign requires.
• Premium pricing everywhere: One price, full game, no in-app purchases — including on iOS, where that’s still worth saying out loud.

The Combat Engine

The strength of Quest’s system is how many decisions it stacks into a small space. You’re building three 8-card character kits that must function as a single 24-card machine. Armilly wants to swing swords and build steam pressure. Copernica wants to spend that pressure on fireballs. A third hero might want to tank, heal, or debuff. The deck is where those agendas negotiate.

Then the hero chain rule bends everything. Because chaining three cards from one character triggers a weapon-specific bonus, there’s constant tension between playing the objectively best three cards in your hand and playing three matching cards for the chain payoff. Sometimes the chain bonus — a free heal, an extra attack, a stat buff — is worth playing two mediocre cards to reach. Sometimes it’s a trap. The game never tells you which, and that ambiguity is where the strategy lives.

Redraws deepen it further. You can mulligan cards each turn at a cost, which means even a bad hand is a puzzle rather than a punishment. The amount of choice here is dense rather than overwhelming: every turn has a clearly best line, and finding it feels like solving something.

Boss fights are where the system earns its keep. The campaign’s tougher encounters and the optional arena demand actual deck surgery — swapping heroes, re-crafting cards, rethinking which weapon’s chain bonus you’re building around. A comfortable autopilot deck won’t survive chapter bosses.

Where It Thins Out

The honest criticism: the RPG shell isn’t as ambitious as the combat core. The story is pleasant, the jokes land more often than not, and Armilly’s arc from guild-reject to actual hero hits its beats competently. But character development is light, the worldbuilding gestures at more than it delivers, and the plot exists mostly to escort you between fights. This is a game you remember for its systems, not its scenes — a real limitation in a genre where narrative is often the point.

Pacing wobbles too. Chapters are structured as linear gauntlets of encounters, and the longer ones are built from the same few enemy archetypes rearranged. The game combats this with new heroes and card unlocks arriving at a steady clip, and mostly succeeds — but around the two-thirds mark, the loop’s edges show. The campaign is the right length for this design; much longer and it would break.

The crafting economy also front-loads its interesting decisions. Early on, resources are scarce and every upgrade is a meaningful trade-off. By the late game, the design lets you afford most of what you want, and the tension dissolves into bookkeeping.

None of this sinks the game. It just marks the ceiling: Quest is a very good combat system with a good-enough everything else.

Image & Form’s art team did not phone this in. Quest is entirely hand-drawn, and it shows in every frame — thick storybook linework, warm painted backgrounds, and character designs that make chassis and rivets read as expressive faces. The steampunk-fantasy mashup could easily have looked like a Pinterest board; instead it’s coherent, from the mushroom-cap peasant bots to the ornate boss designs. It may be the best-looking game in the SteamWorld catalog, which is a competitive category.

Technically, the design works in its favor: a 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, so it’s well suited to everything from older iPhones to a docked Switch. The UI deserves specific credit: card text is legible, steam-pressure and status effects are readable at a glance, and the combat animations are built to keep a long game of turn-based fights from feeling sluggish. One design wrinkle — late-game status-effect stacking can clutter the battlefield readout, and the font sizes in handheld Switch mode ask a lot of the eyes.

This is a game that works everywhere, but the platforms rank cleanly.

Nintendo Switch is the native habitat. Quest was designed as a Switch exclusive, and the cadence of its chapters — short, self-contained chunks — fits handheld sessions well. Button navigation of cards is quick and tactile.

iOS is the sleeper pick. The premium port (no IAP, no ads, one price at $1.99) translates card play to touch naturally — dragging punch-cards onto the battlefield suits the format. On an iPad, this may be the definitive version. The only cost is screen-glare legibility on smaller iPhones during text-heavy card comparisons.

Steam is the utilitarian option. Mouse control is perfectly fine, and the game is inexpensive — but nothing about the design exploits the PC. If you have all three options, the PC version is the one you buy for convenience, not preference.

SteamWorld Quest is what happens when a disciplined studio borrows a trend instead of chasing it. Image & Form took deck-building’s best idea — that a hand of cards makes every turn a fresh tactical problem — and grafted it onto the structure the genre usually throws away: a real party, a real campaign, real progression. The result out-thinks most of its roguelike contemporaries while staying warmer and funnier than nearly all of them. The story won’t stay with you and the pacing sags in the back half, but the combat system is strong enough to keep you shuffling anyway. We rate it a solid, flawed-in-ways-that-matter package: recommend it to deck-building fans, and on iPad it’s the version to get.