Wildfrost: The Cutest Roguelike Deckbuilder

This game is adorable Slay the Spire, and I am 100% here for it.

Written by Zanadood (@mrzanadood)

There were many fantastic games released last year, but one of my favorites hasn't gotten as much love as I would have liked, and I am here to remedy that. Wildfrost is a deck-building roguelike that aims to answer the question, “What if the cutest characters imaginable were used as fodder to defeat waves of enemies in a wildly randomized fashion?”

Wildfrost is More Than Just Cute Cards

I sometimes wonder about the efficacy of comparing games to others in reviews, but I understand it can be helpful to the consumer. That said, if you enjoy other games in this genre, such as Slay the Spire or Monster Train, this game will scratch that itch for you. A unique spin on the familiar genre, Wildfrost allows players many opportunities to set up cohesive runs and rewards ingenuity. However, the endgame can seem a bit unfair or poorly balanced.

The focus of this game is to pick your leader, a card that will always be in your starting hand, and recruit companion and equipment cards to clear encounters and boss fights. These fights are turn-based, and each companion (and enemy) has a turn timer to determine what order attacks will occur. You can also alter these timers depending on how you play your cards. You can speed up your timers with cards or add time to enemies' cards with abilities like Snowball.

*dies of cuteness*

After encounters, you will choose a path to venture down to collect the various rewards to bolster your deck and individual cards. These rewards will vary in helpfulness, but there are enough options that player choice feels important and empowering. Players can equip their cards with unique charms to increase health and attack or add special abilities to help curate their run to a specific playstyle.

Some cards can have keywords, which are just special rules the card can have. For example, cards with the Barrage effect will attack all enemies in the row. Another interesting twist on the genre is that Wildfrost has lanes to play your cards in; you can swap characters to lanes freely, and it is heavily encouraged. This adds another strategic layer to the game and can ultimately make or break runs because you restart at home base once your leader dies. 

One part of a roguelike that can make or break the experience for the player is the progression in between runs. Wildfrost does a decent job at this, providing players with meaningful rewards and unlocks, but nothing that blew me away. In runs, you are tasked with challenges that will unlock more cards and buildings at your “home base.”

Home, sweet home.

This progression system is familiar; it is similar to games like Rogue Legacy 2, but my only gripe is that I wish the progression system was more developed or took longer to complete. I had unlocked the three distinct “tribes” after a handful of runs, similar to how long it took me to unlock all the town buildings. While not necessarily bad, it allows players to develop new and innovative strategies earlier on, but it doesn’t always feel rewarding. This is my own preference, though. I know from experience that many other players prefer the hastened pattern of unlocks. In this genre, ending a run without progressing or unlocking something new for the next one can be frustrating. It is a tricky balancing act between the two design options. 

Like its predecessors, Wildfrost relies on a combination of randomization, strategy, and luck to determine whether your deck of cards can bring you past the end boss. Since this is a spoiler-free review, I do not want to discuss how the final boss plays out, but any fan of the genre will agree it's an interesting take, even if it can seem unfair or imbalanced at times.

The final boss, for example, is dynamic and changes based on your previous run, making it incredibly difficult to get a streak of successful runs. Although I found it a bit frustrating, it’s undoubtedly a clever idea. The team at Deadpan Games did their due diligence. 

Charming and Challenging

Wildfrost sparks the most joy for me with the attention to character design and art style in their cards and environments. Card characters like Big Berry feel like a lot of love and passion went into the design, and his ability has proved vital in many of my runs. Other characters feel the same; they are consistent and designed well.

Uh oh, here comes Big Berry.

Since this game was a collaboration between Deadpan Games and Gaziter, I expected a cohesive and original art style from the second I saw the trailer. At the start of each run, each tribe will generate three characters to pick from to be your leader. The appearance of the leaders and their abilities are pregenerated. That will sometimes lead you to play a tribe you don’t enjoy as much, but only because there is a leader with an enticing ability you do not want to pass up. The game's ramping difficulty will force you to select the best choice for your run.

I consider myself a connoisseur of sorts with these games, and I am wholly embarrassed about how many hours I have dumped into games like this. We are not talking about 100-200 hours; realistically, we are looking at 1000-2000 hours, which is a conservative estimate. Considering this, Wildfrost is a significant challenge, and cohesive strategic runs are harder to line up than other games. There are charms you can buy that disadvantage the player or are only helpful in very specific circumstances. You are already scraping by on most runs, but in my opinion, this is not necessarily bad.

Wildfrost takes bigger swings than other games, and creating a broken game-busting build is harder to accomplish than in other games. If you are someone who does not appreciate a challenge, I can understand how frustrating it can be when you don’t always have a robust build to rely on consistently. Experimentation with other builds is necessary and encourages players to think outside the box. 

The Future of Wildfrost

The only part of this game that underwhelms me is that it would benefit from more progressional content and balancing tweaks. To the game's credit, they are doing just that. Also, pitting this game against others in the genre, like Slay the Spire, is unfair because, at launch, I felt the same about STS. It needed player feedback and balancing to come into its full form. They have seemingly set themselves up for continued support, they have already released several balancing and bug updates, and they have ample room for new inclusions.

If they take this route, we could see an abundance of new ways to interact with the game. They could add new tribes or followers, charms or items; the possibilities to expand on this solid foundation are endless. Wildfrost is one of those games that would benefit significantly from extended updates and support to retain players and carve out a niche for itself in this genre.