Wildfrost - Demo
3I heard some good things about this game, and it had a demo, so I decided to give it a try. This is a deckbuilding game themed around the folklore of the far north regions (Norse, Inuit, Siberian, Ainu, Viking) though with a major 2010s CalArts vibe to it. The premise is that the titular Wildfrost are taking over large parts of the land by force as an invading horde of monsters and bad guys, and various heroes have risen up to fight them. This being a deckbuilding game, you start out with a standard deck of cards, and between battles, you’re given more cards to add to your deck. Though it would’ve been nice to see the characters out there on the field with animated actions, I would guess that they dind’t have the time or budget for that.
You may notice I had a bit of trouble following the instructions during the tutorial. A large part of it is the color contrast. It looks okay if you’re seeing it from about 18 inches (45 cm) from the screen; it looks not okay if you’re seeing it from about 6 feet (1.9 meters) away, where it becomes a largely illegible mess of yellow. This is a common mistake of many indie games though, where they might be tested solely on desktop or laptop monitors and not on a TV viewed from a distance, and it’s something not immediately obvious until you experience it yourself. I don’t know what system Wildfrost was originally on, but if it’s something like Steam, I can see why no testing was done for legibility from far away.
In any case, as you complete battles, you’re given more cards to add to your deck, whether that be characters, equipment, spells, or miscellaneous effects. Nevertheless, the hero who sets out must not let their HP completely deplete…upon which I found out that it uses a roguelike structure, in which each failure builds towards unlocking facilities around the town of Snowdwell to strengthen your deck. While I understand the appeal of a system like this, I personally find it needlessly frustrating to have to start over again and again, which is why I avoid roguelikes and why I don’t really like Splatoon 3’s Side Order too much. It also makes this demo’s structure kind of confusing, as it feels like I didn’t actually reach the end of it. You see, the demo lets you go to the first major boss, Bamboozle, which has stats WAY higher than the mini-bosses prior. After about an hour’s persistence, I overcame it, only to be shown the Ice Caves segment, whose very first battle had enemies of such incredible overwhelming strength that I decided to just stop right then and there. Like, as in the miniboss of this segment had HP about 7 times higher than that of Bamboozle. By this point, I was about an hour and 20 minutes into the demo, and I decided I'd end it there.
There are two other things that bug me though, albeit in different ways: the fact that you send a different, randomly generated hero out each time, makes it feel like they are effectively going on suicide runs, rather than a normal player character for a roguelike, who winds up back at the start and recuperates, and their tenacity is a character trait. It makes Wildfrost (the game) come across as unintentionally depressing. The other thing that bugs me is that the pet shop appears to be run by an anthro cat or arctic fox...or arctic wolf or malamute or weasel (hard to tell, as a white-furred character with triangular, pointed ears and a flat face with a black mammalian nose is the most generic, ambiguous design), making it an animal person selling animals.
As you might figure, I won’t be getting this game. It’s just not for me. I appreciate the thought put into it and that it must have been crafted carefully, but playing a game like this would just make me mad.