Griftlands Review: It’s Better if You Don’t Compare It
When Griftlands launched, it seemed to be billed as the latest in the deckbuilding roguelite craze. However, it never made quite the splash that was promised, in spite of Klei’s promising track record with cult-hit indie games. Playing the game, it’s easy to see why it might not have taken off, but it’s also a shame that its strengths are so readily overlooked.
Griftlands’ card-battling is fun, but frankly not as fun as staples like Slay the Spire or Monster Train. This is the biggest elephant in Griftlands’ room. It’s enjoyable, but it just doesn’t have the depth or fluidity of play that make those games so fun to repeat. It also has a higher degree of meta-progression than either of those games, which can make it feel like your first few runs are needlessly stacked against you (and without any of the thematic, structural, or narrative innovations that make something like Hades work).
As far as deckbuilding roguelites go, it’s not immediately obvious what this one has over others just from a glance at its card-dueling mechanics. The biggest unique touch that I spotted in its marketing is that Griftlands also uses a separate deck of cards to represent your character’s skill in negotiation. Encounters might force you to cast arguments instead of attacks, with room for specialization in various forms of diplomacy, intimidation, or anything else your Bard has proficiency in. After playing it, though, you quickly realize that, while this card-battling dialogue is just as fun as the fighting, it ultimately feels like a convoluted reskin of combat rather than a meaningful simulation of negotiation.
The roguelite structure also doesn’t seem to fit Griftlands quite as well. It’s easy to run through Slay the Spire in a quick session, win or lose, but if you play Griftlands expecting the same addicting loop of pick-up-and-put-down cardplay, you’ll be disappointed to see that the game length drags in comparison, and spends a lot of time outside of the cardplay entirely. This is Griftlands’ biggest weakness and its biggest strength: it’s not just trying to be Slay the Spire. It’s also trying to be a Western RPG.
A narrative RPG focus and a roguelike/lite focus do seem incompatible at first blush. Imagine Planescape with permadeath, or Nethack with dialogue trees and carefully scripted questlines. But by adopting an accessible and popular gameplay loop, and supplementing it with meta-progression, Griftlands makes it work. Like any good roguelite, the threat of death is constant, and this informs every decision you make. However, the gameplay is easy to understand and offers a number of opportunities to leverage an advantage. The end result? Griftlands finds an entirely new way of making moral choices meaningful.
Because one bad encounter can end an otherwise promising run, selfish, even downright evil choices tempt in a way they never can in your typical RPG. In your average Bethesda or Bioware game, staying on everyone’s good side and valuing heroism and diplomacy usually produces the best results narratively. Sure, you can be the bad guy, but what for? The best Western RPGs often work around this by trying to give you morally ambiguous choices, or delaying the consequences so far that reloading a save for the better outcome isn’t practical. Griftlands has its share of that too, but its world is just dangerous enough to consider things you’d never do in Skyrim or Fallout outside of an “evil playthrough.” Yet it’s sufficiently short and approachable that doing the right thing isn’t an immediate non-starter — plus, just like real life, sometimes making friends really is the best call. While it’s not the first or only game to enhance its narrative through genuine permadeath, it’s the most accessible — and successful — that I’ve played.
So with so much focus on storytelling, my assessment of Griftlands has to come down to its writing. And Klei’s writers do put in an admirable effort (as do their animators and character designers, as always — Griftlands looks great). Its worldbuilding is cleverly thought out, and navigating the different factions produces genuinely engaging conflicts. But whether due to the short length of its campaign or the fickle nature of procedural generation and regular restarts, none of the individual characters, relationships, quests, or moments stuck with me. The big ideas are there, and they’re memorable, but I’m not sure it sticks the landing. Still, the integration of narrative, role-playing, and gameplay is an impressive innovation. But it’s also kind of a shame they picked a genre of game that’s simply more fun when the mechanics come first.