Gordian Quest

Summary: If you are a fan of deckbuilding card battlers, with a dash of RPG, then Gordian Quest is the best of the bunch. While there are a few tutorial elements and stability challenges to attend to, the endless replayability and randomization element makes every run unique.

However, if you want the game in portable form and don’t have (or want) a Steam Deck? It’s a great addition. Sure, you will have to wrestle with the game’s interface a little bit and there will be the odd moment where you feel like something should have worked but you couldn’t see a bit of text that indicated otherwise. But the game is good enough that a bit of interface jank hardly pulls it down, in the end.

Gordian Quest is a deckbuilding roleplaying game developed by Mixed Realms. It sees you play as an adventuring character in a fantasy world where humans are under threat from mysterious undead forces. The game comes with a campaign mode, a realm mode, and a skirmish mode, with ten heroes to choose from as your player character.

It's deeply disappointing to play Gordian Quest and encounter the amount of UI-driven issues that permeate its menus, because it has some really cool stuff going on beneath its bristly, frustrating outer shell. It's decidedly easier to pick up than most other deckbuilders, and combat has a good flow to it, with lots of combinations and deck variations to explore. Unfortunately, it's a horrendous Switch port that makes even simple things difficult. It's worth your time, just maybe not on the Switch.

Because the entire time I played Gordian Quest I kept asking myself, why did this game exist? The campaign is a long and winding trail of loosely strung together plot points and humdrum quest objectives. After a few hours of gameplay your encounters amount to roughly the same things in a monotonous rhythm that does little to excite. Even realm mode felt underwhelming, being essentially a branching-path version of the campaign without the ability to go back to town.