The deckbuilding roguelike genre has been solved at this point. I don’t mean that in a bad way; it’s just that we’ve had a lot of takes on it since Slay the Spire really boosted the genre into the stratosphere. Demon’s Mirror, then, has a fairly large obstacle to overcome, because how do you stand out when there are already so many options to choose from? It turns out the answer is by also throwing in a match-3 game.
It takes a little bit of time to adjust to the way that Demon’s Mirror does things, and it initially feels as though the card game and the puzzle game are essentially separate. The only thing that appears to connect them is that a couple of your cards can interact with the board, and that everything costs energy, which means you need to decide if you’re better off matching a bunch of tiles to attack, get energy, get armour, or get willpower, or if you should use a card to do one of those same things or something else.
However, as you get to grips with not only the three characters available, but also the core mechanics each of them has, and then start properly building around them, everything starts to mesh together to make for a smoother experience. My favourite character of the three is one who can apply a unique status effect called influence, which basically represents them talking to the enemies you’re fighting, and if you can apply more influence than they have health remaining, they get taken out of the fight.
Despite being my favourite, this was also the character I had the hardest time finishing the game with. I could see an incredibly cool build in there based on skill cards that cost 0 energy, a card that applied influence X amount of times (where X was the number of skill cards you’d played), and a card that allowed you to put any 0 energy cards back into your hand from your discard pile if you matched green tiles. I then just needed the right relics, which ended up being ones that could reduce the cost of green tile chains, and a couple of others that let you match for free if you played enough cards.
Once I had this working, it took maybe four runs for everything to properly coalesce in both my head and my hand, until I suddenly had a build that actually beat everything within the first two turns. I just needed to keep thinning out my deck until the combo was guaranteed, and then just play a lot of cards to draw more cards and keep doing so for free, until the card that allows you to inflict three influence for each skill card would hit upwards of 200 in total.
The reason I spent two paragraphs detailing that one specific combo is because Demon’s Mirror is full to the brim with different builds to explore and combinations to mess around with, and you can make the game harder or easier with special modifiers you unlock, as well. There’s not as much to do here as there is in some other examples of the genre, but what is here is a delight.
