I can see what this is trying to accomplish, but five hours in I dread the idea of playing it to completion.

The fights are the same, all fights are the same, every fight is the same. It's possible the three criminal factions will differentiate themselves in the late game but I don't feel like going through hours of repetition to get there.

It's not just on a mechanical level where this lack of distinction is a problem. For a game that has very clear genre influences there's a severe lack of juice running throughout. All the characters are the same once you get past their immediate backstory, the enemies are the same. With the latter we don't know why they do what they do, our motivations do not exist beyond "shoot criminal".

One of those games where the devs were so clearly focused on getting all the features they desired into the experience they didn't really nail any of them.

If a game is ambitious, shows heart and is reasonably functional I can be a big fan, even if the execution is as rough as sandpaper. In many ways this is an unremarkable, even flawed story-based autobattler from an unseasoned team. So why have I rated it so highly?

There is a huge character roster in Kingsblood, every one of which has a unique model, special ability and full voice actor. This is the part I love most about this game. Individual characters will have little interactions with each other that help flesh them out and thanks to the trait system you're highly encouraged to mix up who you bring on missions, meaning you'll end up seeing most of these over the course of a playthrough.

The thing is, a lack of funds and experience precludes games from ticking a lot of boxes. The proc gen missions (as opposed to the story ones) are a waste of time, a lot of the voice acting is, charitably, amateur, the crafting and items are undercooked. But with the effort put it, a lot of these things end up feeling minor and in some cases even a bit sweet. In a high production game a villain named Hellbert with a "nerd guy trying to do tough guy" voice comes off as stupid, here that's a good thing!

Kingsblood is clearly a work of love and for all its faults I found it incredibly endearing.

I enjoyed my time with this game well enough. Not a huge fan of the scoreboard aspect, don't really like rushing through puzzles.

My big gripe is that I never could quite get a handle exactly how much distance I needed with to kill the armoured enemies. My general preference is that tools should have a level of expressiveness to them, and while your other telekinetic abilities fit this, the power shot was more like "use this to kill that specific enemy and hope you gave yourself enough distance".

It took me a while to vibe with this game at all. It felt very wonky in a way I never entirely shook. I found myself enjoying it more as I began to explore its open vistas. But for every level or area that had a neat idea there were two or three that failed to really grab me.

That said, I can very much see this as being the kind of game that alters your brain chemistry if you play it at the right moment. The way it never explains itself to you, the atmosphere, the mystery - I give it five years before we get a video essay calling this an underrated masterpiece that does good, not viral numbers. And y'know what? I think Automaton Lung deserves to find its cult, even if i wouldn't count myself a member.

Full disclosure, played this while fretfully waiting for news about my missing cat, so probably not in the most charitable frame of mind.

That being said, while the art style is lovely I can't help but still feel this one is a bit of a time-waster. The creeps don't fall in the right combination this one time so you play the levels again until they do, refilling your limited use power ups again and again while grinding up the really good ones. By no means the worst or most exploitative example of its genre, but feels like that's not saying much.

Full disclosure, played this while fretfully waiting for news about my missing cat, so probably not in the most charitable frame of mind.

That being said, while the art style is lovely I can't help but still feel this one is a bit of a time-waster. The creeps don't fall in the right combination this one time so you play the levels again until they do, refilling your limited use power ups again and again while grinding up the really good ones. By no means the worst or most exploitative example of its genre, but feels like that's not saying much.

Full disclosure, played this while fretfully waiting for news about my missing cat, so probably not in the most charitable frame of mind.

That being said, while the art style is lovely I can't help but still feel this one is a bit of a time-waster. The creeps don't fall in the right combination this one time so you play the levels again until they do, refilling your limited use power ups again and again while grinding up the really good ones. By no means the worst or most exploitative example of its genre, but feels like that's not saying much.

One of the most common additions to the roguelike deckbuilder formula you see out there is overworld exploration, as opposed to branching path nodes in the style of stuff like Slay the Spire. Normally I dislike these. They offer the illusion of choice while often just serving as nothing more than a resource track to deal with.

Draft of Darkness, in trying to blend with survival horror, is probably the best attempt I've seen. Traversal itself does not cost anything, the idea is to conserve resources for fights. See, most of your cards cost consumables such as ammo or batteries to use at their full power, being subbed with weaker "conservation" moves if you won't or can't pay that cost. Thus rather than frantically looking for the way out you're offered choices in and out of fights as you pick your way through each stage.

The characters and recruitable allies offer a nice variety of different strategies, although their viability is equally variable (looking at you, crossbow lady). Honestly, this is what I primarily come to rougelike deckbuilders for, so DoD gets a big thumbs up here from me.

So why isn't my rating higher? While it nails the two big elements that would be needed to make this combo work, resource management and fun character variety, I think a lot of the underlying details could stand to be much tighter.

Proc gen maps means a lot of those potential exploration choices are going to be robbed from you by sheer luck. Maybe a bunch of enemies will stand in the path you need with no way around. Maybe you'll stumble into a couple hidden by the fog of war. And while most enemies remain stationary on the overworld a few do have limited movement, and it's impossible to tell which this applies to.

Probably the thing I enjoyed the least was the granular detail in damage and resistances. This is another thing developers love adding to their deckbuilders and I'm skeptical of its utility. This in combination with procedurally generated gear (urgh) meant I wasn't particularly excited to get stuck into the weeds of this game mechanically as much as I might have liked.

The overarching story unfortunately didn't grab me enough to keep up with continued runs. So overall a lot of interesting, unevenly executed ideas.