Burn With Me: Devilish deck-building
Burn With Me is a horror-themed deck-building card game in which cards are sacrifices in service to summoning the Devil himself.
Deck-builders are a difficult but rewarding beast to tame. Despite the simple design principles of the genre, the joy of playing a deck-builder is learning how the cards work together and constantly improving the strategy. In Burn With Me, the joy is also in knowing that for every card played, and every round completed, the player is one step closer to unleashing unimaginable horror.
The objective of Burn With Me is to progress through thirteen stages and meet the rising score requirement of each stage. To earn points, players place a set of five cards drawn from their deck on the points of a pentagram. Cards have score values and effects that scale or increase the points, or remove the card from play. At the end of the round, players acquire new cards for their deck. In classic deck-building tradition, the strategy is to acquire cards with effective synergies.
The game's flavor is where the appeal lies. Card acquisition is not just a matter of play, but summoning the dark entities on the cards. Disposal is, naturally, a ritual sacrifice. The entities on the cards all have strange and absurd imagery with names qualified by random adjectives, such as the Murderous Lasius, a bow-tied insect, or the dour-faced Righteous Ogre, or even the snake-bagging Damned Felis.
I found the card synergies generally work well. Cards that scale or gain points based on their position relative to neighboring cards seemed to work the best. However, the temptation of playing a card that grants a one-off high score before being sacrificed to the void is sometimes too hard to resist. Ultimately, the amusingly numbered seven-card hand leaves a lot of the initial strategy to chance.
The game's sound is created by composer Nikita Melnikov and sound designer Andrey Astrov, who conjure an offbeat but stylish soundtrack. The background music takes a kitchen-sink approach: a low bass, dissonant bells, keys, brass, and the odd drone, which somehow is tied together with a swinging rhythm section.
Burn With Me is being developed by Nozomu Games, a Munich-based independent studio formed in 2023 by Ivan Bushmin and Eva Manuilovich. Nozomu Games entered game development by creating small titles for game jams, and in that tradition, the original iteration of Burn With Me was created over a three-day period for the Ludum Dare game jam in April 2024.
The jam version of Burn With Me can be played here. Nozomu Games have teased a full release of the game on Steam and itch.io at some point in the future.
