Hello friends. This is a Let’s Play video of “Slay the Horde” demo version. This game is an attempt at combining horde survival with a roguelike deckbuilder card game. Unfortunately, the result is a rather generic fantasy chaos generator.
Sometimes the best marketing decision an indie developer can make is to admit, in the official Steam description, that they have produced “a rather generic fantasy chaos generator”, and Regretware’s Slay the Horde is leaning all the way into that. Pitched honestly as a horde survival roguelike deckbuilder about a generic fantasy mage doing generic fantasy mage things, this is a top-down pixel-art mashup of two of the hottest indie genres going, Slay the Spire’s deckbuild-and-synergise loop and Vampire Survivors’ screen-clogging horde annihilation, dressed in self-deprecating dev humour and an admirably anti-hype tone. Cast the mandatory fireball, freeze a goblin and feel nothing, summon undead minions, stack spells in ways that probably should not stack, and watch a tidy starter wand evolve into the kind of unreadable chain reaction that makes you wish your monitor had a higher refresh rate. The official bullet list literally includes “questionable balance decisions” and “an attempt to turn lack of originality into a feature”, which honestly sets a healthier benchmark for honesty in early-access marketing than half the genre. Demo is live and parked in Steam Next Fest. For a game that promises to be aggressively generic, it has a surprising amount of personality.
Developer: Regretware
Publisher: Regretware
Genre: Action, Strategy, Roguelike, Deckbuilder, Card Battler, Indie
Release Date: To be announced
Reviewed on: PC/Windows
Available on: PC/Windows
Link: Steam
Review copy was demo.
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