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Shadowhand might be the best puzzle combat game since Puzzle Quest. by Mischief Maker 05/20/2018, 3:32pm PDT
Well this was a pleasant surprise!

Essentially it's puzzle quest with taking turns on the match-3 board replaced by taking turns on a solitaire card game.

The premise is you're a young English noblewoman whose chance robbery by a highwayman gets her embroiled in a convoluted plot involving everything from outlaw smugglers to corrupt nobility that she navigates while disguised as the highwaywoman Shadowhand. I'm about halfway through the game and I'm finding the story compelling in part due to the shockingly fast way she transitions from debutante fretting over stealing a horse to casual mass murderer.

The game plays in two modes: straight solitaire and boss battles.

For the solitaire, cards are arranged on the board with in various piles and pyramids with only the top card able to be played. The goal is to clear the board by matching the card in your hand to a fully exposed card one number higher or lower. Clearing a pile down to the board grants gold, and long chains give a global gold multiplier that applies at the end of the round. As the game goes on, the piles become more difficult to manage with very few exposed cards at a time, or whole stacks cut off from the player unless they expose some sort of key card. There are also sometimes free items buried under stacks that you can collect once all the cards covering the item are removed.

The boss battles are the same solitaire game where you and the enemy take turns trying to chain matches to power up your skills and weapons. Each card removed gives a charge to all your weapons and active skills, cards whose suit matches the weapon give two charges, and long chains generate a damage multiplier. If you clear the board, it's refilled with cards and you can continue your chain. As the boards become more complex you can get into tactical situations like where each shuffle is a race between you and your opponent to dig out the free healing potions buried under the cards first.

Now as the game goes on and the solitaire gets harder and the enemies get tougher, you level up attributes that tip the odds back in your favor by giving a percent chance to cheat. "Finesse" stacks the deck so the next card in your hand is guaranteed to be useful, "Luck" can cause extra cards to be removed from the board, and so on. There's also a HUGE selection of armor and equipment that you need to mix and match to each enemy's skills and damage types (easily shown in a mouseover popup before every fight). But biggest of all are your active skills that take a lot of charges to fill, but can reshuffle or otherwise affect the table in big ways to extend a long chain to ludicrous lengths, and charges for active skills carry over between rounds.

Compared to, say, Ironcast, Shadowhand succeeds because the puzzle is fun on its own and there's no such thing as a wasted match on the board, just more useful matches than others. Bearing in mind that this is game has no ambitions beyond being an excellent puzzle game with RPG elements, I'd call it a complete success. The only thing I have that's sort of a complaint is the very early game success is very RNG-dependent before you start earning your strategic cheat powers to make things more determinative. Hats off to the developers!

As of this posting it's on sale at the humble store for 35% off. If you want a Puzzle Quest killer, this is the closest any game I've ever played has come to succeeding, and I'm including Puzzle Quest 2 in that mix. Highly recommended!
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Shadowhand might be the best puzzle combat game since Puzzle Quest. by Mischief Maker 05/20/2018, 3:32pm PDT NEW
 
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