Griftlands is a magnificent, story-rich deck builder that utilizes rogue-lite mechanics to add stakes to its gameplay. Its unique combination of narrative depth and strategic variety kept me coming back for more throughout my sixteen hours of logged play. During this time, I played runs as each of Griftlands' three characters, delighting in their mechanical differences and the way that these differences encouraged diverging strategies when it came to building their decks. While at first blush I was mystified by the game's decision to include two decks for each character - one for negotiation and one for battle - and the change in mechanics and verbiage that came along with this choice, I soon learned that this is where Griftlands separates itself from the pack. It's an instant classic that is a must play for fans of the deck building genre and one I'd strongly recommend to pretty much everyone else.

The game's core loop is as follows: talk to an NPC, receive a quest, travel around the map (with random encounters along the way), choose to negotiate, battle, or do a little bit of both as you interact with other NPCs and make your way toward quest completion, gain small rewards to build your deck or enhance your character, travel back to the first person you talked to, gain large rewards to build your deck or enhance your character, repeat until victory or death.

Each story that Griftlands tells feels like a well-written choose-your-own adventure novel with unparalleled interactively, meaningful choices, and the strategic trappings of two deck building games wrapped into one. The game's details feel hand-crafted and full of care, pulling you further into its fiction as you talk and fight your way through a post-environmental sci-fi world. It gives a Star Wars vibe if all magical force powers were replaced with the boxy tech and embattled grittiness of Mos Eisley. If, instead of depicting the classic struggle of good versus evil, George Lucas decided to chronicle days in the life of the galaxy's most eccentric grifters. In this way, Griftlands presents its players with a world that feels at once lived-in and novel. An accomplishment in itself. I can't get enough of it.

You start out playing as Sal, a bounty hunter who returns to the crime-ridden continent of Havaria to exact revenge on a debt-broker named Kashio who sold Sal into slavery ten years prior. Traveling through Havaria feels dangerous - Murder Bay and Lakespit are among the destinations you'll find within its depths - but Sal is prepared. With her two daggers and impassioned purpose, you'll put Kashio in the grave or die trying. Sal's battle and negotiation mechanics are the most straightforward when it comes to the game's deck building elements. Opt for chains of "combo" or "bleed" in battle to tear through enemies. Go for max resolve or dominance in tense discussions to win marks over with kindness or by being cold as ice.

After Sal, you unlock Rook, a retired military captain who now freelances in the putrefied wastes of Grout Bog to earn enough shills to survive. In Rook's story, you play both sides of a tense civil war between technocrats and laborers to unlock the secrets of the bog and make some real money doing so. In battle, Rook wields two specialized service revolvers from his military days. The revolvers take charges to operate, and a lot of complexity is introduced to Rook's battle deck by how to maximize or minimize charge and what effects, then, can be added to his attack and defense maneuvers as a result.

In Rook's negotiations, Griftlands' most charming yet arguably most inscrutable character-based core mechanic rears its head. Rook is a sharpshooting gambler, and the way the developers choose to depict this in conversation is through a special coin. Rook flips this coin when a card effect called "gamble" comes into play. Depending on if the coin lands on "heads" or "snails," a different effect takes place. You are able to swap out coins throughout a run. Different coins give different effects based on flip results. Similarly, various cards will have bonus effects depending on which side of the coin is showing face up at the moment they're played. Needless to say, the coin makes building a deck complicated, and within the first hour of my inaugural Rook run, I thought this level of complexity bordered on the unnecessary. However, once it clicked, it led to one of the most rewarding deck building experiences I've had.

A tip when it comes to this game's sometimes overwhelming amount of mechanical depth: generally, collecting cards that allow you to do more of each character's "signature moves" and/or draw cards is a failsafe option. I think of this as "turning over the deck." If I can keep my deck size small enough and upgrade enough cards, then turning over my deck and utilizing my character's special as many times as possible is bound to produce positive results. For Rook, turning over the deck in battle means gaining a lot of charge and playing cards that utilize charge. Similarly, turning over the deck in Rook's negotiations means flipping his special coin as much as possible. Meanwhile, for the game's third and final unlockable character, Smith, turning over the deck means drinking a whole lot of alcohol and having a dang good time doing so. More on that below.

Smith is the black sheep of a wealthy family. The Banquods are an illustrious dynasty, and Smith's parents expected their children to carry on tradition. Most of them did. Smith's youngest brother joined a merchant's guild, his sister became a military official, and his eldest brother is a Cardinal of the region's local Cult. Meanwhile, Smith chose to party, drinking his way through the posh coastal city where he was raised. That is, until one day when his parents die in a cataclysmic event known as The Breaching. When Smith returns home for their funeral, he is shut out of the Banquod estate by his siblings. For the rest of Smith's journey, you attempt to take control of the estate while unraveling the cultish underpinnings of The Breaching and the city that it forever changed. Negotiations for Smith are fairly easy to navigate. They resemble Sal's in enough ways to gain a foothold and forge a decisive path. However, Smith's battle technique is completely novel and comes with a baked-in learning curve.

Because Smith needs to drink to fight, and drinking from a card effect introduces "empty bottles" into your deck that you can then expend to either draw cards or increase the effects of cards that utilize empty bottles for their maneuvers. Additionally, Smith's jocular party-guy attitude imbues him with a mechanic called Moxie, wherein a counter increases every time Smith hurts himself on his turn. Smith is then healed by the number of stacks on his Moxie counter when his turn ends. It's a complicated yet genius cocktail of mechanics to invoke the spirit of a die hard partier who can also kick a whole lot of ass when he's had enough drinks to be fully in the zone. Smith is able to regenerate with Moxie, but without a strategic approach to his build, he'll lose health far faster than he can heal it. Just make sure to turn over his deck, drink a lot, and utilize his painful yet powerful drop-kicks. It's a blast.

As you play through each character's story and travel around their exquisitely drawn maps, you're faced with a bevy of random encounters that run the gamut of surprisingly helpful to downright shitty. Rook will get stung by a bug that implants a parasite into the back of his neck (and parasitic cards into each of his decks). Sal will come upon a lumin-dog companion animal and then be faced with the decision of whether or not to return it to its owner. Smith will find a sandwich and then be faced with the worker whose sandwich he found. Each of these encounters - and many, many more - occur randomly while you travel between checkpoints on your main quest, and the majority of them provide benefits or strap you with hindering circumstances that can greatly affect the outcome of a run.

For instance, if Sal decides to return her canine friend to its original owner, she'll earn hundreds of shills, in-game currency that she can then buy upgrades with to help better synergize her decks. However, if she keeps the lumin-dog, the character who is asking for it back will hate her, implementing a persistent mechanical debuff and fixing to cause trouble for her as she progresses through her story.

Hate is the negative end of the spectrum of an NPC's feelings about the player-controlled character in Griftlands. NPCs can also dislike you, feel neutral about you, like you, and love you. NPCs who dislike you will aid in battles and negotiations against you but do not apply persistent debuffs or actively pursue your demise if it's not already occurring. NPCs who feel neutral about you do nothing and can be swayed in either direction by your actions. NPCs who like you will come to your aid and help you out with small benefits. NPCs who love you provide a persistent buff that will help you in negotiation and battle.

In general, completing a quest successfully for an NPC will get them to like you. Then, giving them a gift or showing your loyalty will progress their feelings toward you, turning them into love. Similarly, NPCs will dislike you if you don't do what they ask of you or if you go against their immediate interests. They'll hate you if you harm them egregiously or kill one of their friends. Indeed, once you've vanquished an enemy in battle, you're given a choice. You can execute them or spare their life. Sparing their life sometimes comes with narrative implications. However, killing them always triggers the mechanical consequence of another character hating you, applying a debuff, and purposefully getting in your way later on in the game.

One of Griftlands' crowning triumphs is its ability to present players with meaningful consequences at every stage in their journey. These consequences arise from random encounters, conversations with NPCs, and choices made in the heat of battle. Choose wisely - because love and hatred carry immense weight in the Griftlands, and if you're not careful you'll be crushed.

Another special element of Griflands that deserves mention is the interconnectedness of each playable character's story. When playing as one character, it's possible to encounter the other two. For instance, as Rook, you can randomly meet Sal out in the bog and help her with a quest. You can also refuse and potentially invoke her fury by doing so. While these types of details may sound simple, they immediately make the game feel contiguous, as you realize that each of these stories is not playing out in a vacuum but rather in the same world. You realize that the maps are connected. That the same characters overlap between each one. You come to know who wants what and why. There's an intimacy that arises from multiple playthroughs in any rogue-like. Griftlands recognizes this and ingeniously stitches the fates of its playable characters together, imbuing its world with the familiarity that comes with walking through it from three widely varying perspectives, each stemming from a wholly unique individual identity.

You earn card rewards in Griftlands when you win negotiations and battles and when you complete quests. However, there's the potential to win far more than cards. Grafts are persistent items that you somewhat haphazardly drill into your brain to tip the scales of combat and negotiation in your favor. You can start the game with unlockable perks. You gain prestige and mettle on a run to unlock benefits that are transferable between runs even after you die. The game handles this anomaly in its fiction by introducing a mysterious vendor who encourages you to make it "as far as you can" and will assure you that "all must end well." When you die and restart a run as the same character, a random encounter gets added to the pool that allows you to thrift goods from the mettle vendor that have been looted from the corpse you left behind on your previous attempt. It sounds grizzly but is a charming discovery all its own, much like Griftlands at large.

Still, that's a lot of details to keep track of, and my main knock on this game is that the amount of complexity it introduces right off the bat can be overwhelming for even the most experienced deck builders.

The separate negotiation and battle decks are what confused me at first. I had played about an hour of the game on my first run before switching it off. My partner asked me how I was liking it, and I answered honestly that I thought Griftlands was good but getting in its own way.

However, once I stuck with it and everything clicked, it swiftly became one of my favorite games of all time. Therefore, my fellow owl, all I ask is that you give this game 1-2 hours to grip you before making any judgments. For me, that's all it took before I discovered that Griftlands is pretty freaking special. 9/10.

Where it shines:

• Great story
• Meaningful consequences
• Tension-building random encounters
• Mechanical richness from character to character

Where it fades:

• Learning curve for each character
• Slightly inscrutable at first blush