Within the past few years, I have grown to have a fondness for Deck Builders. Games like Slay the Spire and (to a lesser extent) Guild of Dungeoneering have really enriched my gaming experience. So, when I saw Castle Morihisa being offered in an email, I was immediately intrigued.

In Castle Morihisa, you play as one of four classes, each with its own deck. You are a spy assigned to infiltrate the titular castle, as several diplomats have gone to meet with the ruling family there and have not returned. You progress from room (or encounter) to room, making your way toward the deeper parts of each act.

Each room can consist of a regular battle, an elite battle, a resting zone, a chest, or a mystery event. Unlike Slay the Spire, you can only see what your current options are. This means that while you may have 4 fight options ahead of you, you can’t see what is beyond them, making the choice somewhat pointless in that situation. However, there are times when you will be able to strategically choose not to fight, or to rest and heal.

You can use the store at any time outside of battle, as you gain currency (coins) from fights and events. You can also get quests from fighting elites, which ask you to do a specific task for a reward. These tasks might be to block a certain amount of damage in a single fight or deal a certain amount of damage to enemies. At the beginning of each run and each of the three acts, you are able to choose a fallen hero skill.

These skills are powerful but have limited uses. My favorite one is a skill that instantly kills any enemy with 30 health or less, which can save you health on a particularly rough run. After each room/encounter, you gain talent points. Each character has a talent tree of sorts, a skill tree that gives you bonuses. Some of these bonuses are reminiscent of artifacts from Slay The Spire, though artifacts are still a thing in Castle Morihisa.

Each run, your skill tree is slightly different, so there is a lot of versatility to it. You can buy talent points in the store as well, so when you get to later parts of the game where talents cost more points, you can offset only getting one per room. Here is where things get a little bit frustrating.

I like the variability of each run, with different talent tree options, and the variety of cards giving you an opportunity for different decks. However, the difficulty level escalates at odd intervals. In fact, if you don’t have a cohesive build after a few fights, you’ll find that things get difficult quickly. The game encourages you to fight elites because you make more money and get quest scrolls. However, Elites and Bosses are very challenging, especially early on.

On top of that, other than unlocking the Samurai and Ninja classes from succeeding runs, I can’t seem to find any sort of progression. Unlike Slay the Spire there isn’t much in the way of unlocking relics or new things, though perhaps unlocking all the characters leads to more.

There are also some moments where it is clear that (when docked at least) this version of Castle Morihisa wasn’t exactly prepared for use on a TV. In the options, I only had the choice of 1280×720 for the resolution. It looks fine on my screen, but certain text boxes are cut off, and there is no way to fix it.

The gameplay is a lot of fun, but between the difficulty spikes and a few bugs/visual problems, I can see some people being frustrated with Castle Morihisa. I enjoy it, and I think it brings some cool ideas to the table. It improves on Slay the Spire in some ways, but it also doesn’t feel quite finished. Hopefully, some post-launch patches will fix some of the problems.

A Nintendo Switch review copy of Castle Morihisa was provided by Thermite Games for this review.

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$14.99 USD

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• Interesting Character Classes
• Engaging Character Builds
• Beautiful Art Style

Cons

• Map Choices Feel Somewhat Pointless
• Harsh Difficulty Spikes
• Not Optimized for Docked Play
• Very Little Meta Progression