As We Descend, a pretty stylish-looking upcoming deckbuilder from new studio Box Dragon, will be published by Coffee Stain, the same folks publishing hits like Valheim and Deep Rock Galactic.
Describing itself as a “roguelike deckbuilder with the soul of a strategy game,” As We Descend has a nice aesthetic that seems to blend magic with technology in a desperate, dystopian city-vault that is humankind’s last outpost on a devastated world.
As We Descend will have a roguelike structure, with each expedition out of the city having you compose your unit of several squads of specialist units, with retrieved tech from outside the vault giving you more types of units to access. Combat will have two zones for your units to move between: A forward defense area and a rear support zone. The key to success will be in moving them between the two in response to enemy intents.
The other part of the game will be exploring cityscape of the vault in order to “make contacts, gather forces, scavenge ruins, and find valuable resources to gain an advantage over the deadly monsters threatening humanity’s existence.” You’ll use those resources to beat back attacks by the monstrous enemy, who kind of look like fantasy creatures crossed with deep sea coral and mineral formations.
Developer Box Dragon was founded by two former Stunlock Studios (Battlerite) developers, Kevin Chang and Karl Bergstrom, with senior character and environment artist Aleks Nikonov from Riot Games.
“It feels like only yesterday we were announcing that Box Dragon existed, and here we are over two years later unveiling what we’ve been crafting for all this time,” said Kevin Chang, Game Director at Box Dragon, in a press release. “We’re ecstatic to begin playtests in our closed beta to help shape the development of our game. We still have a lot of work ahead of us, but we know that we can make As We Descend an S-tier roguelike deckbuilder with the help of passionate players who love this genre and are eager for something new and big.”
You can find As We Descend on Steam and on its official website. If you’re interested in trying a closed beta, you can sign up for that on the official website as well. It doesn’t yet have a release date.