Dark Sky Review

Dark Sky is a “narrative RPG deckbuilder” developed by Ganymede Games and published by Midwest Games. I’ve played so many deckbuilders since I started working for GameGrin, but rarely do I ever play one where I get to keep my deck instead of starting again from scratch every 30 minutes or so. This may take a little getting used to.

The game starts… at the end. An unknown force is causing spaceships to suddenly start falling from the sky, bringing death and destruction to the mining planet of Wolf Prime. Housing all sorts of species from across the galaxy, it'll be up to a ragtag bunch of misfits to find out why this is happening and save the world.

The story is really engaging. The characters are likeable and funny, and the worldbuilding is really detailed without going into information dumps. The dialogue is also very natural, while still giving you everything you might want to know about Wolf Prime and its inhabitants… and some you might not want to know; the story behind “Bloody Tears Gulch” is brutal, something that I wasn’t expecting from a game like this. The animations are wonderfully done as well, with a great art style to match, and excellent card designs.

But speaking of, let’s get into the meat of the game. You’ll be playing as Squig in the overworld, walking around to find resources and getting into encounters, but your party will consist of five other heroes, who all have unique mechanics and cards, which get combined into a single deck. Before you start a battle, you select three of your six heroes and their starting positions on the battlefield, which is laid out in a grid. Once you feel like you’re ready, begin the battle. You have two resources: MP and EP. MP (Movement Points) will allow a character to change their position on the grid whereas EP (Energy Points) is used to play cards. What I found interesting was that you can discard and draw new cards for free every turn, allowing you a little more control over what can play. You can only do this three times, but it really helps with searching your deck for a better card or activating “on discard” effects. There are also a whole host of different status effects you can inflict on enemies, some of which even combine together to create unique reactions; both great for you and bad for your opponents. I can’t tell you how I pull them off because I usually do it by accident, but there are definitely benefits in experimenting with the various debuffs and buffs.

You will need to watch your party members’ HP, as they don’t heal after fights. It can make long sequences of battles without breaks or healing chests pretty draining and could end with you in a bad situation where all your characters are on low HP at the beginning of a fight. Don’t worry too much about it, though. While you can’t play their cards once they’re knocked out, they can be revived mid-battle as long as you have 1 EP and another party member is right next to them. You also get a free HP refill when levelling up, which is nice.

Speaking of, when a character levels up, they earn SP which is used to upgrade their cards. Each card has four upgrades, but you can only choose two, so pick wisely. You can reduce the EP cost, add bonus effects, or just add bigger numbers. I really liked this system as it can drastically change how to play a card. You can get new cards by finding them out in the world or trading the scrap you loot, which encourages exploration. You can even craft additional copies of cards so you’ll have a better chance of drawing them.

You’ll need to constantly manage your cards and upgrades if you want to get through the game because fights are the only thing you’ll be doing. Sure, you can wander around environments, but they are pretty linear with a clear critical path. There are plenty of little moments between characters that help break up all the fights, but it does get a little tedious if you decide to play for long sessions.

That’s about it for the main gameplay, but what about its performance? For my playthrough, I ran the game on maxed-out graphics settings and had no issues with framerate and I’ve got a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER installed. However, if you have an older PC, you may find yourself having issues, and you may have to toggle V-sync. I did run into some glitches though. I ran into a softlock where I could only draw one card, couldn’t play it despite having the EP, and couldn’t end my turn. There’s no option to restart a battle or anything, so I had to back out. I also ran into audio issues where the background music and battle SFX didn’t play, leading to a very quiet battle. Other than that, it was pretty smooth sailing for the rest of the journey.

Dark Sky is a very solid deckbuilder that makes every encounter and choice matter. How you build your decks and upgrade your cards will vary drastically from one person to another, and all have the serious potential of becoming great. You’ll need a good strategic mind that can think several steps ahead to win some fights, but those who can understand and exploit the game’s mechanics will very much enjoy their time.