Nowhere Prophet

« As a lover of strategy card games, I was extremely pleased by Nowhere Prophet and am excited to go back to it again. It has everything you’d want from a card game: combat, strategy and a huge plethora of options for your decks. It can be very difficult to begin with until you’ve mastered the game’s rules, which may initially turn some players away, but stick with it and you’ll find an excellent adventure lying in wait. »

« Nowhere Prophet is an excellent single player card battler that punish you with its difficulty. The battle system has a lot of depth to it, while you're constantly worrying about your convoy as events take their toll. Still, death simply means starting again with a freshly generated campaign and getting to see more of the game's world. Nowhere Prophet can be frustrating at times, but it's fun to play through and is highly recommended to those who like strategy or card battlers. »

« Overall, Nowhere Prophet manages to feel like a completely new experience, despite the fact that you can see a lot of the game’s influences in the way it plays. The mesh of different ideas and genres makes for a game that will hook you and keep you coming back for more. Even losses aren’t as infuriating as they could be thanks to the regular unlocks you get as you go through each run. It’s just really good, and if you like card games, then you should add this to your shuffle pile. »

« Nowhere Prophet is a single player, deckbuilding roguelike that manages to balance each of its systems to create interesting, engaging and unique stories. While it isn't without faults, its complexity and intrigue make it something you'll keep coming back to. »

« This is a game that goes far beyond what could otherwise be a rather limited framework. Nowhere Prophet is an addictive, striking card game with an impressive world to explore and tale to tell. A little bit of creativity really goes a long way. »

« I love the music, the electro-Indian soundtrack is so wonderfully unique and gives the journey such a magnificent texturing. The various factions with their distinctive styles, like the Blue Devils that voluntarily allow themselves to become infected and die young in order to become more powerful. Sharkbomb Studios have done fantastically to create a gameworld that feels unique to the point that I, even more than usual, want more games based on cultures outside the usual UK, US, Japan influence. And while I have harked on the gameplay, I actually really enjoy it up until the inevitable unfair fight that brings me to my old friend, the Game Over screen. It’s much like FTL. Yay, yay, yay, ooh close one, yay, no, what, stop it, bugger off, f*** this game, repeat. »

« Nowhere Prophet combines two very different genres: TCG and roguelike, to create a hybrid experience that surprises in how organic it feels. The card-based combat has depth and weight, and adds to the game a sense or permanent loss that feels great. »

« Defeat in Nowhere Prophet can be creeping, as your resources drain away, or sudden, as you fall victim to an unexpected combination of cards. Either way, it feels like playing against an opponent who overturns the table when they win, leaving you to gather up the spilled cards. It'll be another couple of hours before you have a deck that feels unique, before you escape the mire of enemies and text events you've seen a dozen times. It's enough to make you a sore loser. [Issue#336, p.118] »

« I liked the art style, the atmosphere, the exploration part of the game where you travel across the map, and even the camp management to a degree. The writing is rather basic as post-apocalyptic sci-fi goes, but it gets the job done. However, the card combat system itself which lies at the core of the game is rather rough. For starters, unlike most games of this type which have you assembling your deck from scratch or starting with a few simple cards, Nowhere Prophet handles you a full deck from the very start, which is a terrible idea in my opinion. Most cards are very weak, but at the same time fairly complex to play. Most cards can't act on their first turn, mostly die from one hit, two if you're lucky. Before you get any good grasp on how the combat flows, you'll have half of your crew wounded (or dead since you can't heal your allies at the beginning of your journey). Truly a puzzling choice, if you ask me. I've just defeated the enemy gang, there's no one around, I have the meds, and yet I still somehow can't heal? That doesn't make any sense and is a total arbitrary bs. And I get it - it's roguelite, you're not expected to win on your first run. But it doesn't mean there shouldn't be a normal learning curve and gradual, organic difficulty progression. Oh, and the gamepad controls are pretty terrible. Instead of simply using A to confirm/proceed, you have to manually drag the stick, even on screens where you have no options. Very clunky and weird. »

« An excellent roguelike deck building. I don't understand why it's so under-rated. »

« Let me be clear: the game is HARD! Even in easy mode. Is the best deckbuilder I ever played (besides Slay the Spire) the art is outstanding, the world is well build, and had a lot of lore, the card mechanics are of the best in a deckbuilder like EVER! it's seen unforgiven at first, but when you take the grasp of in, things start to work, addictive as hell! Prepare yourself to die a lot! »

« Nowhere Prophet is a roguelike with nice visuals and solid effort put into dialogue choices, in the process the devs however forgot to think about replay-ability. The game lacks varied starting options, enemy types are few - and due to more or less RNG card acquisition, building dedicated archetype decks doesn't work. Yet, the game is easy enough to play it through in my first ever attempt. It wasn't a bad experience, but I have no incentive to ever play it again - which makes me feel like this isn't a roguelike, but rather a relatively short adventure game. »

« I desperately wanted to like this game, I saw it was on game pass and since game pass had other good card games like Monster Train and Slay the Spire I was excited. However I was met with a soul-crushingly hard game. And not fair like other difficult games but to the degree that it made the game unfun. For example after every area you complete you are met with a city, these cities are the only places that you can heal and they have a 5 charge healing, and they cost food which you need to travel, and it heals your leader and cards separately. The thought of including a mechanic that deliberately makes you use your legendary cards less is dumb. Also the enemy attacks your followers even when it is smarter not to because they want to do this. »

« Nowhere Prophet sounds like a great game on paper: roguelike card-battling strategy game in an interesting setting filled with tough choices ... but it falls so flat for so much promise. It attempts to channel some parts of games like Slay the Spire but badly misfires: like Slay the Spire you are saddled with cards that cost an increasing amount to remove from your deck. But unlike Slay the Spire, the amount of cards that you start your deck with is too large to be wieldy and you find the use of some cards so counter-productive that using them is suicide. Why? Because your actual combat cards - your followers - can only die twice in combat before their card is REMOVED from your deck. So you find that the AI opponent specializes in attacking your cards rather than your character ... which is a hideously bad mechanic as the only way to acquire new followers is to spend the SAME CURRENCY you need to hoard to remove leader cards. Want to buy that Legendary card with great stats and wonderful combat buffs? Well, don't play him unless you are certain he won't die. Yes, you can heal your cards, but that mechanic is so rarely encountered in rest camps compared to the number of battles you fight (we did say this was a roguelike, right? So pretty much there are battles and bad things happening everywhere ... even after you beat the boss at the end of each chapter) that you pretty much have an endless churn of combat followers, which dilutes any strategic deck-building you may want to do. The price of combat is so high, so affecting, that it overwhelms the permadeath mechanic and instead just leaves you frustrated at how whimsical and brittle the system is. And that is on the easy difficulty. I'll freely admit I didn't even bother on harder difficulties. I couldn't glean much fun on the easy one, and that after several "lives" and new game starts after dying. The gist here is to "level" up and unlock new perks that increase your character's chance of survival, while simultaneously opening up new starting decks ("convoys") and higher powered buffs/de-buffs. And that I can appreciate. But unlike Slay the Spire, where you can learn to beat the bosses with minor modifications to your deck and even starting cards have some use, you will find enemies (particularly bosses) have a depth of cards that you would drool over. Buffs which you cannot acquire are played by your enemies 3 or 4 times ... sometimes in 1 turn. After many hours playing I realized the reason the enemies go after your followers rather than generally attacking you is that there decks are so much better they would wipe the floor with you if they actually played like a human. That level of gimping is simply ridiculous. You aren't meant to win. You are meant to grind. Slay the Spire allows you to craft a deck that is focused. Nowhere Prophet throws random cards at you and then kills a good portion of what you choose under the guise of being a roguelike. In a roguelike you are meant to learn the way to win by struggle. In Nowhere Prophet you only learn to delete the game. »

« This one has OK gameplay and style. Games are pretty long though, 1.5-3 hours per run. But there's where the trouble comes in. The game can be punishing the way roguelikes are, but each run is too long to learn things the hard way. And the losses can be extremely unfair. In a good hard game you will lose and lose but want to keep playing, a bad hard game will only make you feel cheated. This one is the latter. »

« This game is highly underrated IMO. The game is beautiful, the combat is extremely deep, and story is really compelling. In addition, the developer is extremely active on Discord and Reddit. If you enjoy the deck building rogue-like genre or wanna give it a try, definitely pick this up. »