Steamworld Quest is a card-based RPG game. Even though it is using the Steamworld robots, the theme seems forced since it is really set in a fantasy world, and the robots don’t tie into the theme whatsoever aside from a few puns like Gilgamech and Necronomicog.
You begin the game with 2 characters but soon gain a third. There’s a couple of other characters that join later, but you can only have 3 in a battle. Each active character contributes a deck of 8 cards which are shuffled together. Without any cards to modify the rules, you play 3 cards per turn from a hand of 6, and can discard 2 cards per turn. When your deck is depleted, it is reshuffled and you carry on as normal.
If you play 3 cards by the same party member, you gain a bonus move which is determined by their “weapon”. Some cards have a bonus move if they are played after a specified character card. Enemies usually play 1 or 2 cards.
There’s many basic cards that can be played for “free” and these generate Steam Power. This is used to play the Skill cards that have a cost. Really, you need 4 basic cards in each person’s deck in order to have a good balance of cards that you can play.
Defeated party members are a serious problem because it restricts what cards you can play. You must discard their cards and hope you draw cards for your other characters, but sometimes your hand will still contain unusable cards. So it affects you more than a standard RPG would. Although all characters have some kind of card that can heal, Galleo mainly focuses in healing and status buffs, so he is often an important team member to have. You can use Recovery items in battle but this counts as a played card.
Status effects often have a massive impact. There’s modifiers like raising/lowering defence/magic resistance/physical/magic attack, and statuses like poison, confusion, paralyzed, blind, bleed, and many others. Some of these have many levels, so defence can be increased many times. There’s no limit to how many statuses are active at once.
You can find new cards in chests, gain some via story events, or buy them at the shop. At a certain point in the game, you can start upgrading your cards.
Sometimes you have to learn what enemies are in the area then switch your cards accordingly. There were many bosses where I failed/quit early, switched my cards and tried again. Annoyingly, there’s no option to save deck/team configurations. In some ways, it’s not a huge problem because I found my deck was evolving/improving rather than requiring radical changes. Even when I did make drastic changes for a boss, sometimes I just switched out a few defensive cards for attacking ones for the next section since you generally want to play more cautiously against the bosses.
You can equip 2 accessories which can give you resistances to certain statuses, give you extra health, elemental resistances and more.
I felt the UI was a bit clunky and unclear. I expected to be able to hover over status icons to see what they represented, but I had to go into another menu to find them. You need to remember the keyboard shortcuts because the UI doesn’t make it clear either.
You can replay areas to grind or find treasure that you missed the first time around. There’s one or more statues in the level that acts as a checkpoint, respawns enemies and heals you. You can take advantage of this to grind out some experience too. I didn’t use that feature often though.
You can slash some destructible objects for coins. You can sneak up on enemies to deal a small amount of damage and start the battle.
The game was at a good length, taking me around 22 hours. The story/dialogue/environments weren’t very interesting but I don’t think that matters too much. In this type of game, you need a good battle system, and this was great and kept me hooked.