Indies' Lies Review

Indies' Lies is a single-player roguelike deck builder developed by Fun Square Games and published by Erabit. If you’ve played Slay The Spire, you’ll find yourself on familiar grounds here. You use cards to fight and defend yourself, and you can see what an enemy will do before their turn. In the roguelike mode, you’ll travel up a board encountering enemies, doing events, and playing minigames to improve your deck to become strong enough to defeat four bosses. Forethought and a little bit of luck will be your greatest allies in this game. However, what’s unique here is that the items you usually get to improve your character for a run are replaced by Talents, which is essentially a randomised skill tree that provides various bonuses. You’ll need sparks to unlock them, which you can get after defeating a boss, from an event, or buying it from the shop. I really like this system because you have more control over your build while also encouraging the ability to adapt when RNG doesn't give you the cards or Talents you want.

There are nine characters split amongst three classes at the time of writing, each with their own unique cards, Talents, and playstyle. If you have the DLC, you get an additional class with three more characters. As you get through a run, you can recruit two others of these characters so you can combine cards and create new strategies. If they die, you can still use their cards, but you lose additional draws and energy to play cards so it's best to keep them alive, even if only your main character killed ends the run. It’s a really good system which encourages experimentation—trying to find who works best with which team set-up.

With every run, you unlock new cards in your main hero’s card pool, and with every successful run, it unlocks a new difficulty for that map so you can retry for a new challenge with the same or a different character. Win or lose, it made me eager to go into another run.

Successfully completing your first run with a character will unlock their story mode, which is a run where encounters and events are set, and you get to learn a character's backstory and the lore of Mekaa. Losing will reset your progress so you have to play your cards right if you want to complete them. It’s a little disheartening, honestly. While there are some fun challenges, there are others that make me unwilling to go through it again. I am, however, not too interested in the lore, but that’s just my preference and you can skip dialogue pretty quickly. Still, it’s a nice thing to have if you ever get bored of randomised runs and want something more structured.

The artwork for cards and story cutscenes are wonderful to look at, and characters are animated beautifully. The world of Mekaa has some great backgrounds and maps to appreciate while you’re figuring out your next move, with a mixture of mediaeval fantasy and steampunk which creates some interesting enemies and bosses to fight.

In conclusion, Indies’ Lies is fun for anyone who likes games with card systems, and if you’re looking for something similar to Slay The Spire, I highly recommend this. It gives you more control over your build than other deckbuilder, and each character offers a unique playstyle to take advantage of with every run provides a new challenge or a unique opportunity to break the game.

Indies’ Lies is available now on Android and PC via Steam.