Bottom Line: Image & Form's card-battling RPG is the rare genre hybrid where both halves pull their weight — a genuinely deep combat system wrapped in a gorgeous, funny storybook adventure. The plot is thinner than the mechanics deserve, but this is one of the smartest 15-20 hours the deck-building genre has produced.
The Combat Engine
The genius of Quest's system is how many decisions it stacks into a small space. You're not just building one deck — 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. IGN called the amount of choice "insane" in its 8.6 review, and that's the right word slightly misapplied — the choice isn't overwhelming, it's dense. 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. If you've been autopiloting with a comfortable deck, chapter bosses will audit you.
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 start to feel like corridors of the same three 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, you'll feel the loop's edges. Fifteen to twenty hours is the correct length for this design; five more would have broken it.
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, you can 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 an excellent combat system with a good-enough everything else.