Trials of Fire

There’s a point, somewhere past the initial confusion, where Trials of Fire stops being bewildering and starts being compelling. Getting there is the problem. This is a game that arrives with no interest in flattering you.

Whatboy Games — a small studio founded by ex-Rocksteady developers, the people who built the Arkham combat system — has made something almost aggressively unlike a Batman game. Trials of Fire is a tactical deck-building roguelite set in Ashe, a scorched post-Cataclysmic realm rendered as a papercraft diorama. You draft a party of heroes from a roster of classes, then push across a procedurally generated open world with a sandstorm chewing up the map behind you. Scavenge ruins. Trade in settlements. Watch your supplies. Keep moving.

The market positioning here is unusual, and worth being precise about. This isn’t Slay the Spire with extra steps, and it isn’t Into the Breach with cards bolted on. It sits in the gap between them, and it’s one of the few games that has actually made that gap habitable. Where Spire abstracts combat into a damage-and-block arithmetic problem, Trials of Fire drops you onto a hex grid where flanking, line of sight, and the sheer geometry of where your Warden is standing determine whether a card is brilliant or worthless.

Commercially it’s done fine without ever becoming a phenomenon: an 81 on Metacritic and a strongly positive Steam reception. PC Gamer called it “perhaps the most compelling strategy game to come out in 2021.” Eurogamer landed on “a complex but seductive deck-building strategy game.” Both of those verdicts are correct, and the second one is doing quiet work with the word complex.

It’s premium, offline, and free of microtransactions — a rare posture for a game with this much content behind it.

• Shared Party Hand: All heroes draw into one communal hand and spend from one communal resource pool. There are no individual turns. You decide, every round, which hero gets to act and which stands there doing nothing.
• Loot-Driven Deckbuilding: You don’t draft cards. Every weapon, armor piece, and trinket you equip physically rewrites that hero’s deck. A new sword isn’t a stat bump — it’s a deck edit, and sometimes a build demolition.
• Hex-Grid Tactical Combat: Positioning, facing, elevation, and turn sequencing carry as much weight as card selection. A perfect hand played from a bad hex is a wasted round.
• Papercraft Open World: A procedurally generated overland map with settlements, ruins, and a supply economy, all presented as folded paper models on a tabletop — with an encroaching sandstorm as a hard timer.
• Judgement Encounters: Hand-written moral dilemmas between fights, with consequences that persist across the run rather than resolving in a single dialogue box.
• Content Volume: A deep pool of skill cards, a large item catalog, a wide bestiary, multiple bosses and game modes, and seasonal quests. No live-service scaffolding attached to any of it.

The Gameplay Loop

The core insight of Trials of Fire — the thing that justifies its existence next to a hundred other deckbuilders — is the shared hand.

Think about what that does. In a conventional party tactics game, each character is a discrete budget: this one gets two actions, that one gets two actions, spend them independently. Trials of Fire collapses all of it into one pot. Your hand contains cards belonging to every hero, and your resource pool is communal. So every round becomes a genuine allocation problem. Do you dump most of your resources into your Barbarian for a chained assault that clears the left flank, leaving your Ranger and your Ritualist standing flat-footed for the entire turn? Or do you spread it thin and accomplish three small things badly?

This creates a rhythm you won’t find elsewhere. Some turns, one hero carries the round and the others are furniture. That’s not a failure state — it’s the design working. The tension between the hand you drew and the board you’re standing on is the whole game, and it’s why the hex grid isn’t decorative. Cards specify range, direction, and target geometry. A devastating cleave requires enemies in adjacent hexes. Movement costs from the same pool as attacks, which means repositioning is never free and is frequently the correct play anyway.

The loot-as-deckbuilding system is the second pillar, and it’s more radical than it first appears. Because your deck is your equipment, the game never lets you settle. In Slay the Spire, a build calcifies — you find your engine and you protect it. Here, you loot a superior chestpiece and discover it’s swapped defensive cards you were relying on for aggressive ones you don’t want. Upgrades are frequently downgrades in disguise, and evaluating them requires holding your entire party’s card economy in your head simultaneously. It’s hard. It’s also one of the most interesting inventory systems in the genre, because it makes the loot screen a strategic space rather than a numbers-go-up dispensary.

Wrapped around combat is the overland layer: a supply-management crawl across procedural terrain with the sandstorm as a pace-setter. It works, mostly. Supplies deplete, settlements sell gear, ruins hide loot, and the storm ensures you can’t grind. But this layer is the game’s thinnest, and it’s where the seams show. The judgement encounters — hand-written dilemmas with real consequences — are well-written and land more often than not, but they’re islands in an otherwise mechanical sea. The narrative wrapper around Ashe is atmosphere, not story. If you came for a world to care about, you’ll leave with a spreadsheet instead.

The Onboarding Problem

Now the part everyone complains about, and they’re right to.

Trials of Fire has brutal onboarding friction. The tutorial gestures at the systems rather than teaching them. The UI presents an enormous amount of information — card costs, resource pools, hero states, enemy intent, terrain modifiers — in a dense, small-type layout that assumes you already know where to look. Iconography is opaque on first contact. Critical numbers hide in tooltips that require deliberate hovering.

The result is a predictable pattern in the Steam reviews: people bounce, come back, and then sink serious time into it. The learning curve isn’t a gentle slope; it’s a wall with handholds you have to find yourself.

There’s a defense for some of this. Complexity is the product, and sanding it down would produce a worse game. But there’s a difference between a deep system and a badly explained one, and Trials of Fire conflates them. Nothing about the shared-hand economy is impossible to communicate clearly — it’s just not communicated clearly. That’s a UX failure, not a design one, and it has cost this game an audience it deserved.

Difficulty and Variance

The other consistent criticism is RNG. Runs can end to a difficulty spike you couldn’t have played around — a bad card draw against an enemy composition that punishes exactly the thing you drew. It happens less than detractors claim and more than the game’s defenders will admit. Across its modes there’s enough tuning range that you can find a comfortable altitude, but the roguelite promise of “you lost because you misplayed” isn’t always honored here. Sometimes you lost because the deck said no.

The papercraft direction is the smartest aesthetic decision in the game. Ashe unfolds as physical paper models on a tabletop — hexes, cutout heroes, settlements that fold up like pop-up book pages. It solves a real problem: a hex-grid tactics game with a full 3D presentation would drown in visual noise, while a flat 2D board would read as cheap. Papercraft threads the needle. Everything is legible at a glance because everything is deliberately, honestly artificial. The muted desert palette and the drifting sandstorm sell the post-Cataclysmic setting without a single cutscene.

The UI is the counterargument. It’s dense, small, and information-saturated in a way that fights the clean art direction. Card text runs long. Enemy intent requires reading rather than glancing. Where the board is a model of clarity, the interface layered on top is a model of everything else. Form and function are not on speaking terms here.

As for performance: a turn-based tactics game with stylized, low-poly assets of this scope is light on hardware by design, and there’s little reason to expect trouble on anything but the oldest machines.

Steam, PC, mouse and keyboard. This is the correct and arguably only home for it.

The pointer precision matters more than usual. You’re hovering constantly — over cards to read them, over hexes to preview range, over enemies to check intent — and the entire information architecture assumes a cursor. A controller would turn every turn into a menu-navigation exercise, and the small type would punish anyone playing at couch distance.

The upside of the Steam release is what isn’t there. No launcher, no account, no store, no season pass, no energy timer. It’s offline and complete. Whatboy has supported it post-launch with free content and seasonal quests rather than paid drops, which in the current market reads as almost eccentric. Buy it once, own it, play it on a plane.

Steam Deck viability is real but qualified — the UI density that’s merely annoying on a 27-inch monitor becomes a legitimate obstacle at 7 inches. Playable. Not ideal.

Trials of Fire is a genre hybrid where the hybrid part isn’t a gimmick. The shared party hand reframes what a deckbuilder turn can be, and the loot system refuses to let your strategy ossify the way nearly every roguelite eventually does. Years on from release, nobody has meaningfully copied it — which tells you either how hard it is to execute or how badly the industry undervalued it. Probably both.

What holds it back is entirely a communication failure. The systems are strong. The teaching of those systems is poor, and the UI actively works against the clarity the art direction fights so hard to establish. A studio with Rocksteady pedigree — people who once made a combat system readable to millions through pure visual feedback — somehow shipped an interface that requires homework.

If you’re willing to do that homework, this is a deep, rewarding tactical experience, and at $19.99 it’s fair value for the amount of game on offer. If you’re not, it will feel like a puzzle box someone forgot to include instructions for. Both reactions are legitimate. We recommend it to the audience willing to climb the wall — and only to them.