Oaken is a tactical turn-based roguelike with deck management and 3D figurines. Explore the world of the Great Oak, gather allies and enhancements, learn to use the positioning and rotation for your advantage, choose how to upgrade your cards - all in order to restore the Oak's Song.
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Got this in the humble bundle and it was a pretty mid rougelite. I'm sure there are people out there who could invest 100s of hours into this, but this would be more due to their love of rougelites than anything this is doing.
This game is currently in the Humble Choice for February 2024, this is part of my coverage of the bundle. If you are interested in the game and it's before March 5th, 2024, consider picking up the game as part of the current monthly bundle.
Tile-based Slay the Spire.
That’s right, Oaken is a Deckbuilder, and that means comparisons to Slay the Spire, because… yeah, it is Slay the Spire on the map. However Oaken also has hex-based combat where units move around a grid, and there are interesting mechanics at work here. The tutorial took me about 40 minutes, but once the real game starts it’s decently challenging, and that’s going to make some players struggle.
There are good risk vs reward trade-offs such as using a card more than one time in a battle makes you lose the use of the card until the next boss has been reached. How you summon your characters or lay out the board has a lot of tactical depth. There’s also a Relaxed mode which seems like the easy mode if you want a little more help.
At the same time, this is still a deck builder rogue-lite under the hood, while the combat is different, when you die you restart and have to rebuild your deck. Also, there are only two playable heroes which feels a bit light. Oddly enough, having only one may not have had this problem. I’ve mostly seen the tutorial but the main game got hard enough that it’s just stacking huge negatives on me extremely quickly. Maybe it’s luck-based, but I get a bad feeling here.
Pick this up if you want another Slay the Spire game, especially one that’s more tactical. Oaken delivers on that, but it’s always going to be a question of how punishing a game is, and while the first chapter wasn’t too bad, I didn’t get to see a boss and a couple of events were very costly. There’s also mod support but there are only 9 mods that I saw and I believe the support has been out for 5 months.
If you enjoyed this review or want to know what I think of other games in the bundle, check out the full review on or subscribe to my Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/hVGME-pBU7g
Tile-based Slay the Spire.
That’s right, Oaken is a Deckbuilder, and that means comparisons to Slay the Spire, because… yeah, it is Slay the Spire on the map. However Oaken also has hex-based combat where units move around a grid, and there are interesting mechanics at work here. The tutorial took me about 40 minutes, but once the real game starts it’s decently challenging, and that’s going to make some players struggle.
There are good risk vs reward trade-offs such as using a card more than one time in a battle makes you lose the use of the card until the next boss has been reached. How you summon your characters or lay out the board has a lot of tactical depth. There’s also a Relaxed mode which seems like the easy mode if you want a little more help.
At the same time, this is still a deck builder rogue-lite under the hood, while the combat is different, when you die you restart and have to rebuild your deck. Also, there are only two playable heroes which feels a bit light. Oddly enough, having only one may not have had this problem. I’ve mostly seen the tutorial but the main game got hard enough that it’s just stacking huge negatives on me extremely quickly. Maybe it’s luck-based, but I get a bad feeling here.
Pick this up if you want another Slay the Spire game, especially one that’s more tactical. Oaken delivers on that, but it’s always going to be a question of how punishing a game is, and while the first chapter wasn’t too bad, I didn’t get to see a boss and a couple of events were very costly. There’s also mod support but there are only 9 mods that I saw and I believe the support has been out for 5 months.
If you enjoyed this review or want to know what I think of other games in the bundle, check out the full review on or subscribe to my Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/hVGME-pBU7g