Demon's Mirror Review

There are tales of an ancient mirror that takes over troubled souls, consuming them into the darkness. In a fateful stroll through the forest, you stumble upon this same artefact of legend, and upon arriving, a creature from the other side reaches and drags you in, leaving you in an unknown land to fend for yourself. Though strangely, you've walked these roads, you've seen these trees... you get the feeling you've been here. Maybe a thousand times over.

This is the opening sequence of Demon's Mirror, a roguelike deckbuilder mixing in chain-3 mechanics developed by Be-Rad Entertainment and published by Good Shepherd Entertainment. After this brief sequence (and what becomes the opening screen every time you relaunch the title — likely a ludonarrative of you being stuck in the mirror labyrinth, coming back over and over again...), you're presented with the menu, the option to start a new game, and... that's it! You begin your first run.

As a roguelike deckbuilder, this next bit should come as no surprise: you're going to die, and you're going to fail, and you're going to try again. In ludonarrative goodness, you're stuck in an endlessly repeating maze, trying to surpass the three chapters as three varying characters with different decks and foes to fight.

Suffice to say,Demon's Mirror's is great fun. You arrive at a hexagonal map where you'll have to map your way into the final boss, with only the option of moving forward into the adjacent tiles that are connected to yours. From here, the game pretty much stops holding your hand (for the most part — you're not stuck fully blind), and you're expected—— nay, invited to explore in a retro-esque experience.

Your first few runs might be incredibly successful, just as much as they might be god-awful, and that depends entirely on which of the three characters you'll connect with the most. You start off with the default Wulf, a great tutorial character that teaches you about the chaining mechanic and rewards strong hits, and you quickly move on to Draga and Axo; it's safe to say that once you like one of these, it'll take some time getting used to the other two.

Demon's Mirror feels relentlessly challenging, which can either be its charm or greatest downfall. Each run, you'll be expected to choose a character and play with the modifiers, giving you the opportunity to change the difficulty to your liking. At the start, you begin with only the modifiers that make the game easier (five of which affect some of the main aspects of the game), and as you play and complete certain challenges, you acquire the difficulty modifiers that make it feel far, far more hellish.

Wulf, Draga, and Axo all have drastically different playstyles, and to the developer's credit, they all feel unique and very fun to play. Their styles call for different ways to approach combat, and each one has gimmicks that you need to learn and master, making you get significantly stronger merely from learning the synergies with their cards. Each time you play one of them to completion (usually leading to defeat for me), you get some experience, unlock some cards, and are urged to try again — this time, you might just make it further.

In my second run, I played as Draga and nigh completed the third act, dying only two tiles away from there. Yet, in usual roguelike matters, I failed in the second act in my other two runs — a far cry from my seeming beginner's luck of the first run. No run is the same, as everything (aside from your starting deck) is randomised.

This is where I felt Demon's Mirror was perhaps a tad lacking — the randomisation aspect sometimes felt a bit too random. Whereas in other roguelikes, you get the opportunity to start familiarising yourself with builds and acquiring ways to secure at least some good things in your build. Instead, this game throws you into the fray with no such protections. Your beginning relics and cards are your only saving grace, and if your playstyle depends on one specific card, you're in for a bad time.

It's a great way to encourage players to get outside of their comfort zone and learn new synergies and strategies within the characters they prefer. You start a run, adapt accordingly, and you'll eventually succeed... except it's far more complex than that, not just because RNGesus might not be on your side that day.

You see, in any given fight, you're likely to be facing more than one foe (aside from elites and bosses, for the most part). Each one casts its own unique spells and abilities, and the more rounds you run, the more you recognise the troublesome foes and their attack patterns. Enemies have a rather large arsenal of abilities to hit you with, too, ranging from enemy tiles (which are tiles you have to match with others to reduce their power lest you suffer the wrath of a near-one-hit-kill), debuffs, buffs, attacks, shielding, special abilities, unique mechanics, and the capability to add trash tiles to your board. And if that sounds like too much, it's because it is.

Keeping track of everything starts becoming taxing, and fights with even regular foes can take several minutes at a time. Whether it's because you're setting up for a proper hit, trying to get the right cards, or are just trying to get through the fight without taking damage, there are so many things to keep in mind that it makes Demon's Mirror difficult to play for more than a few rounds at a time. That fateful second playthrough I had took me a whopping two hours to complete, and though I was spry, young, and naive at the time, the length and severity of the battles weighs heavy on weary shoulders.

It kills the "one more run" mentality that so often captivates of roguelike adventures; instead, I sometimes found myself halfway into a run thinking I couldn't wait for it to be over, not because I didn't want to play more (I desperately wanted to play more), but because I didn't know how I could leave a run halfway without shooting myself in the foot the next time I boot the game. Demon's Mirror feels nigh-soullike in its relentless punishment of minor mistakes because you have so many things to keep track of that it's easy to forget one. If you hit the wrong enemy, you wasted your movement points on a shielded target; if you forgot an enemy tile, then you're staring death in the eye in the next turn lest you reduce the amount of damage; if you forgot to shield, then you're slowly chipping away at what little life you have to spare. With so few healing points and opportunities present, a mistake often felt deadly and unforgiving, and the slow-paced combat meant that I had a long time of struggle between me and where I failed my last run.

The unique modification system is a plus in this case, however — when you're struggling too much, you can make the game easier without any "penalties" (of course, this will prevent you from getting some of the hardest achievements, like winning in "difficulty 10"). For anyone interested in the gameplay loop, the modifications give you an easy time by adjusting the parts of the game you might be struggling with; for instance, I found I enjoyed the game more when enemies had less health. But, as you get better, you might find you'll need these less.

This isn't to say that Demon's Mirror is bad, even if I've gone on a tirade against it — quite the contrary. Very few times have I desperately wanted to love a game so much or fought through dwindling brain power to get one more round. It's not a traditional roguelike in the sense that you'll be able to jump back in again and again for hours on end, as the more runs you play in a day, the briefer they'll get, but it still sparks that "one more run" mentality, just that it comes with a bittersweet caveat of wondering if you'll have the time — or brain cells — to complete it.