In case you haven’t heard, the Slay the Spire devs recently released a new game, albeit a free one made in three weeks as part of both a game jam and a protest against Unity (the game was made in Godot). Even with those caveats, it’s straight up a lot of fun, and as the first game from Mega Crit since Slay the Spire, it’s worth checking out for anyone who liked Slay the Spire or any of the million games it’s spawned (not to mention fans of autobattlers themselves). It is just a little half baked, but hey, it’s free! You literally can’t even pay for it if you want to, as the creators have instructed any would-be-tippers to direct their hard-earned dough to the Godot Engine Development Fund.
In terms of gameplay, Dancing Duelists really is like Super Auto Pets done by way of Slay the Spire. In other words, it’s a drafting-based autobattling roguelike that allows for various playstyles (based on both the character/class you play and the cards you pick) and includes trinkets (think artifacts) that have the potential to make each run feel completely unique. Similar to Super Auto Pets, the battles happen in an arena mode against CPU opponents, where each battle happens automatically (in the default setting, each card is played one at a time, but you can also set it to automatically play the cards in the same order) and you either win by racking up 7 victories or lose by racking up 3 defeats. This means an average run is under 10 matches, so it only takes a few minutes, and it’s easy to start over with a new character and try again.
It really is a lot of fun, and any lack of polish is easily forgiven by the fact that the developers are not asking for any money at all, so you can just play until you get bored, which for some people might be 5 minutes and for other people might be days and days. Another cool thing I noticed is that the credits on the main menu are randomized in terms of order, so all of the team members get equal footing over time. Maybe this is a trend started by other developers, but I think it’s pretty cool and it’s the type of thing that I’ll be looking out for more in other games in the future.
You can play Dancing Duelists for free on itch.io with downloads available for Windows, Linux, and Mac.
