Ex Dragon Age writer's new studio shrugs off a failed Kickstarter, chucks its exorcist take on Slay the Spire right onto Steam – and it's a cool roguelike with a mana system I don't think I've ever seen

Malys is the next game from Stray Gods developer Summerfall Studios, an Australian outfit co-founded and helmed by former Dragon Age writer David Gaider, and it was described as the "last hope to keep the studio alive" when we spoke with Gaider last month. Things took a turn when its Kickstarter campaign failed, but Summerfall's gone ahead and released the game in Early Access on Steam, and it's off to a promising start as a novel little roguelike card game.

There's a lot of Slay the Spire in Malys, especially in its sprawling map of routes and encounters, but the presentation is wholly distinct – inky, graphic novel-style vignettes with heavy, escalating music – and many core card game rules have seen some upheaval.

You play as an exorcist navigating a city of angels and demons, saving victims of possession through turn-based card battles. (To think, all those priests just needed a good Magic deck.) You draft a deck, negotiate battles, hit up merchants, and work toward the mega-demon waiting at the finish line.

This build of Malys has some obvious Early Access growing pains, with the UI being especially primitive, but what's here is fascinating. This being a Summerfall game, narrative snippets are woven into encounters, though you're currently just sort of thrown into the world with little setup.

I'm most intrigued by the mana system and the small numbers that Malys works with. You use candles to play cards, and you can burn cards from your hand to light candles. So if I have two 1-cost cards in my hand with no lit candles, I'll have to burn one to play the other. Additionally, any lit candles will carry over to your next turn, and because decks are so thin – I only had nine cards after drafting a few more – you can set up for a big play to come. So in the previous example, I could also just burn both cards to save two candles.

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All the cards I've seen cost between zero and three candles, and you draw a new hand each turn. This makes drawing cards extremely powerful since you can use those cards as fuel for candles, and it also means that changing a single digit on a card, via an upgrade system fueled by Faith, can have an enormous impact, like drawing three cards for one candle instead of two, or dealing three damage multiplicatively instead of one.

I'm sure something like this has been done, and I've seen plenty of cards that create mana, but the rules of engagement feel fresh to me. (Imagine every card in your Hearthstone deck could be an Innervate on demand.) All of this creates a card game that, even in very early stages, encourages and rewards a lot of cycling, giving Malys a pretty active feel that I like as someone who enjoys tuning infinite engines in digital card games. Malys kind of starts at that point in a Slay the Spire run where you've filed your deck down to a razor and can cycle through it aggressively.

Your turns are also shaped by what actions the demons you're fighting will take. If a big hit is coming in, you'll focus on putting up Wards to pad your limited health. It's very Slay the Spire in these moments, but the way you pilot and build a deck has a small-scale edge to it.

It's pretty cool, I'd say, and the response on Steam has been positive so far. Summerfall hopes to have the 1.0 version of Malys out by the end of the year, polishing the base and adding more regions, story content, demons, meta-progression, and cards. The game is $9.99 right now, though that price will go up after Early Access ends.

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