*This review is mostly based on 8 hours playing the demo, and one 2-hour run post-release. Will update sometime.*

TL;DR: A good game but not quite ready for release, and the lack of explanations might frustrate you and make it seem harder than it is.

Does the fact that every card you play is destroyed from your deck worry you? It worried me, but it actually works because you get frequent chances to replenish your deck, and you're not playing with several unique cards but rather a fairly tight set of base effects and improved versions of them. It doesn't really matter that your sword is gone after you attack, because you probably have 4 more in your deck, you can get another 6 from the next chest you find, and you might have a magical power that gives you 2 swords for free at the start of every room.

Instead of being a detriment, it's a mechanic that adds a very interesting flow to the game and makes it feel more like you're managing resources rather than recruiting and protecting semi-permanent units like in some other card-based roguelites. With the ability to steal cards from enemies and even the environment, and the possibility of losing cards to them, it feels very similar to taking damage and healing, but with the added dimension of dictating the options you get on your turn.

With that out of the way, I am thoroughly impressed by the gameplay. 10 hours in, I have about 75% of the content unlocked and I still find new types of enemies, cards and powers that completely change my strategies and turn my priorities on their head. I keep reaching rooms that make me think "that new enemy is going to ruin my run" and narrowly adapting my strategy in time to counter them. Some demons' weaknesses are another demon's strengths, so you can't just bank on one type of card and steamroll through everything, you need to be adaptable and try to remember what's waiting for you in each room to keep the right cards in hand by the time you get there. For example, an axe is useless against a row of shielded skeletons, but it was a miracle that I drew 6 of them when I stumbled upon the hydra for the first time.

The "memories" and "imaginary friends" you permanently unlock progressively make it easier to reach farther into the game, and there is enough variety in them to experiment with very different combinations. I keep wanting to see what's in the next room and try playing with a completely different set of abilities. I'm thoroughly captivated by the game.

Now, the game isn’t perfect, so here are the things that need improved in my opinion:
- The game should still be considered in Early Access due to the amount of bugs and the unclear descriptions for a lot of things. Some parts of the menu even still say "to do" instead of having actual content.
- The game relies too much on you finding out that X card has Y side effect on enemy Z. Enemy tooltips don’t tell you everything, and some very important tips are only found on transition/loading screens. The very brief and random nature of those tips doesn’t do a good enough job of telling you how you can use your cards without you having to waste them trying everything just in case. A few examples: the fact that the whip removes shields, that pulling a trap through an enemy kills it, the way that flame demons and bomb snakes explode upon death so you can use them to your advantage, the fact that you get one card of each stack added to your hand when you open a chest, unless you already have 10+ cards in hand, etc.
- Some cards also have a lack of details. For example, the card that "fills your hand with swords" also destroys everything you were already holding, so tough luck when you play it for the first time.
- The amount of RAM the game uses is simply insane for a turn-based 2D game.

All in all, a solid game in the making, but it doesn’t yet have all the polish it should have at release.

Duration:
Main (first) chapter: 3 hours to "defeat" the Giant
I then spent another 10 hours discovering the imaginary friends, winning the challenges and exploring the other (harder) chapters.

Iris and the Giant is a funny game. Not funny, HAHA, but funny-strange.
This is a rouge-like so you'll need to fail a few times and unlock powers and imaginary friends before you will succeed in reaching the Giant.

I almost stopped playing then, as once I defeated the giant, I didn't think the game was very good.

But I'm glad I didn't. I went on to explore the other "chapters", discovered lots of hard enemies (demons), went back to the giant level and worked on the challenges to unlock powers and friends. It's only then that Iris and the Giant began to shine. Stealing cards from a variety of strong enemies made me much stronger and the level of fun went from a ho-hum 5 to a cool-bananas 8. Combined with "magical powers" and all of a sudden the tactical combat blossomed. It almost felt like defeating the giant the first time was the introduction tutorial, and then the real game began.

Worth persisting with, and much better than it seams on the surface.

7.5/10

Iris and the Giant is a roguelite card game about a girl, named Iris, who fights against her inner demons in a dreamworld, which haunts her, while the player gets peeks into the girls' story and life.


I don’t want to spoil the story, so I don't want to go into details, but it is something worth experiencing. Other than that, the whole atmosphere of the game is quite charming. Cute, unique visuals, interesting and refreshing card game concepts, but more about that in the next part of the review.


This is a roguelite card game. This means that you can unlock permanent upgrades for your next run and as you fail more and more (or succeeds) as easier will be your next try. However, this does not make the game trivial, as there are 3 different paths to conquer, and the last one could become achievable only with these upgrades.

The whole “card collection” is also very different from other collectible card games. Every time you use a card that is gone for good. Lost for once and all. This is compensated so that you will have a lot of opportunities to find new cards and when you select one, you get multiple copies from it, Usually 1-8, based on the rarity of that card. Some of the cards allow you to steal cards from enemies and this is where the exciting part starts. About 50% of the card types are accessible only by this way. It might be clear from the previous sentences already, but you can run out of cards, which could be one of the reasons, other than losing your health points, to lose the game.

On each level you need to beat a set amount of randomised enemies and this actually requires some strategy. Sometimes you need to face hard decisions: Would you kill an enemy which could steal your cards or an enemy which would decrease your max health points? Well, or you can shield yourself, if multiple deadly enemies are present, just don’t forget to kill the resurrectors or enemies filling your card slots with curses :-) Out of enemies? Then here is the another hard decision: which stairs to pick, the main path, or exploring secret rooms or deadly challenges.

There are not only permanent upgrades available in the game, but during your run you also find two different types of star, each offering different types of upgrade, allowing you to customise your run to your desired strategy.


If you are looking for a touching story, a relaxing card game and a unique visual experience, then this is a must to play. Would erase my game related memory just to be able to play it again :-)

Visuals: 9/10. Cute, somewhat minimalistic, but very artistic.
Atmosphere: 9/10. Relaxing, sometimes melancholic, sometimes inspiring and romantic music, creative gameplay, touching story, without the addiction of Slay the Spire or Monster Train in which you want to restart right away once you failed in a run.
Amount of crash: None.
Bugs: None, played this one only on deck.
Steam Deck compatibility: Works well on the steam deck, but with base settings not quite responsive to buttons, so playable only with using the touchscreen of the deck.


How to perfect?: Ingame you could unlock a few helpers and all achievements tied to them. You can’t unlock all of them during the same run, once one unlocked a few more gets available.
Perfection Difficulty: 4/10, not really hard to 100%, as you can get 100% on the easiest difficulty. The last cheevos should be, which requires you to unlock all cards. Now the good news: you will need only 51, not all. Otherwise, the game would be slightly harder to perfect.
100% time: 8-10h, but 100% not means you saw everything in the game, so the game offers more playtime, if you want to continue.

If you like to earn achievements, but in enjoyable, fun and entertaining games, then please follow my Average Achievement Hunter curator or just check out our curated games if you looking for some gaming tips:-) Thanks

Game is fun, but a little light on content / easy on normal (might do another playthrough on hard). To me the game also feels slightly overpriced with the content. Its not enough of a negative overall for a don't buy, but may be worth waiting for additional content or finding the game on sale.

I thought I wouldn't like the "use a card lose it" concept, but I actually dont mind it at all. The upgrades to your character/equipment can effect cards, but aren't always in the cards themselves. For example you get a basic axe card, and your upgrades to your character make all axe cards have x, y, or z effects.

Pros:
Graphics style is really appealing
Positional tactics are super important
Several interesting enemies that force you to change strategies
Couple fun little secrets sprinkled around the game.
Stealing mechanic is interesting

Cons:
Lack of card variety/upgrades/companions/enemy variety (My biggest negative)
Game seems fairly short
Pretty buggy, repeatedly ran into end of turn bugs where I couldn't complete my turn without force using cards I didn't want to, ending up in a lost run.

Unlike Slay the Spire, this roguelike deckbuilder has only very similar enemies which require using similar attack cards. I played through the same 15 level campaign, hour after hour, each time tying slightly different roguelike unlocks to make a tiny bit more progression. The process was not much more fun than the first time through the levels.

Played repetitively on an ubuntu linux 21.04 desktop, with a mouse controller. I experienced no technical issues. The game files take 500MBs of diskspace, and the game uses the Unity game engine.

Iris and the giant is a deckbuilding roguelike with some narrative elements thrown in. You play as Iris, a girl who is fighting off her demons in her imagination. You’ll fight off these demons with an assortment of cards, which you’ll accumulate in a deck. One of the key differences in Iris to other deckbuilders I’ve played, is that almost all of your cards are single use and you die if you run out of cards. It’s an interesting twist on the genre.

Please note, while this is a ‘recommendation’ review, it is essentially neutral overall.

https://youtu.be/c4-Bn9QI0Cw

• Great art.
  
  
• The gameplay itself is quite enjoyable. You draw cards each turn which you’ll use to attack the enemies in front of you in order to get to the floor’s exit. Often you can reach the exit without needing to kill all the enemies, though there are sometimes exits that lead to floor skips or bonus rooms. Playing cards and trying to strategize your way through each floor is enjoyable. You also get upgrades for your character throughout a run (such as increasing the number of cards you can draw) and anytime you beat a boss you get a special trait such as getting a free burn card anytime you play a confidence card.
  
  
• As I mentioned in the intro, there’s a bit of a twist on the deckbuilder genre here in that your cards are all single use and you die when you run out of them. This introduces an interesting challenge in trying to balance your deck so that you have enough cards to get to the next chest (chests are the main ways you get more cards) but not so many that you completely water down your deck. I speak from experience when I say that have 55 cards is just as bad a situation to be in as just having 5 left.
  
  
• The card design is good, there’s some interesting variety and there’s 51 different cards in total, though many of them are special cards that you won’t get right away.
  
  
• The narrative is split between Iris’ journey through her imaginary world, and memories of her life. It’s fairly interesting and well told. Finding new memories also unlocks new permanent bonuses that you can unlock, many of these are quite handy.

• There are a lot of unlockables in the game, some of which offer permanent bonuses (memories and imaginary friends) while the other kind (Gifts) only benefit your next run. While I do appreciate having a lot of unlockables, I did feel like success was tied to how much you had unlocked which I’m not so keen on. It seemed like the game was setup so that you had to die at least a few times before you even could get towards the end.
  
  
• Difficulty seems to scale with your overall progress in the game, in that you start seeing more difficult enemies/more difficult enemy variants earlier on in the run. I think this is a good feature, especially to keep hardcore players interesting, but I can see how this might be frustrating for players who are already struggling with the game.
  
  
• Most of the floors have a fixed layout and fairly similar enemy patterns each time you play them. There are alternative/secret routes you can take to spice things up, but a regular run doesn’t have a huge amount of variation in it.

• While I liked the ideas behind the boss designs, I often found them frustrating to fight, even after I had developed a strategy to deal with them. A good example of this is a late game boss that you can only attack indirectly. You need certain enemies to spawn in certain positions in order for it to work out, and this fight quickly turns into a slog of trying to survive long enough for those enemies to appear.
  
  
• Similarly to my last point, there were often floors with layouts/enemy patterns that were frustrating to get through. One issue I ran into a fair amount was needing a specific card or two to take out a lot of enemies. There’s only so much planning ahead you can do, especially with a randomly drawn deck, and I often got into situations where I had enemies in front of me that I couldn’t kill because I didn’t have the rights cards in my hand and I just had to burn cards in my hand until something I could use came up.
  
  
• I really would have liked to see a way of dealing with not having a good hand. I did get a gift at one point that let me redraw my hand, but other than the only way to get more cards is to use what’s in your hand. This can be particularly frustrating in certain situations, perhaps you have several cards in your hand that’ll damage you if you play them, but you can’t attack any of the enemies in front of you with what you have. Even just having a card available early in the game that would let you redraw would have been nice.

An interesting deckbuilder with great card design and enjoyable gameplay that for me was held back by a few frustrations. I’m still on the fence about this one myself, so it’s hard to outright recommend it, but there’s some good stuff here. I'd say it appeals a little more to hardcore players, and perhaps more casual players should hold off for a sale.

If you found this review helpful, please check out my other reviews over at Kemo's Corner.

Cute little roguelike, apparently made by one person. It's easy to pick up and it's easy on eyes and ears.
It tries to deal with depression, but it's about as subtle as sledgehammer to the face, which had the opposite effect of it making me laugh out loud. But I guess I did enjoy that in a way, so all's good.
Don't expect to get 10s or even 10 of hours out of it though, there is not enough depth or variety for that.

Thematically, it's not a very coherent game. It's another cutesy indie game about depression that mistakes speaking about depression with actually thematically building gameplay around the subject. The twist this game brings to the deckbuilding genre is that cards are destroyed as they are played, which feels novel for a couple of runs and then just becomes a drag as you're constantly just looking to stack up cards instead of trying to meaningfully *build* a functioning deck-- which is sort of the appeal of deckbuilders for me to begin with. Enemy abilities are often obtuse, the strategy elements feel shallow and random. The progression loop feels bad and also isn't married to the narrative in any sense. You'll be sitting through the same tired cutscenes run after run. If you can pick this up for under $10, it's worth a couple of hours of play, but it frankly is just doing what other deckbuilders do, but worse.

Designed with love, unpretentious, tactically bitey.

It can be frustrating because there are several ways to lose a good run. But every run brings either some discrete new challenge or unlock progression: new enemies, new cards, new powers, new buffs, a new imaginary friend, a new puzzle, or new information about bosses, so you always start with a small advantage compared to the last one.

This is not Slay the Spire: it is smaller in scale, but tactically sound too. Deckbuilding is limited (cards are consumed, which works well), but no less repetitive than Slay the Spire (contrary to the complaints of other reviewers: the path always consists of the same rooms, but there are shortcuts, forking paths, and hidden things).

It is fun, with a nice learning curve.

Somewhat interesting but feels padded even while short. Also, the storyline is depressing.

You probably got here on a recommendation because you like roguelike deckbuilders like Slay the Spire and Monster Train. This game is not much like them. The combat uses a card mechanic, but it is not "deckbuilding" in the usual sense. Cards are one-time use. You build a deck by frequently adding new cards, and there are some ways to recycle cards, but this is a fundamentally different mechanic than games in the deckbuilder genre. Similarly, there are roguelike elements in the way enemies are randomized and you have some control over the order in which you face them, but the fields of enemies are a different experience than in roguelike dungeon-crawlers. This has similarities to some other games you know, but the Steam tags are equal parts misleading and helpful.

The card battling is straightforward, somewhat simplistic in mechanics but interesting in execution because of the number of things going on. Each card and enemy has a simple effect, but you have a full hand of cards and a full screen of enemies. At its best, each round is a puzzle to be solved balancing resources and damage. At its worst, it is either faceroll easy or an unfortunate mismatch of resources and enemies. There are more complex cards available, but they are either rare or must be stolen from enemies.

Enemies can become interesting as they interact with each other, when you need to prioritize targets and minimize their synergy. At a more advanced level, you can see the silhouettes of enemies to come, so you may want to avoid killing X to avoid having Y come onto the field. Player abilities become interesting by building synergy into your assorted upgrades and then building the deck around that.

Depth is limited and gated. There are 60 cards, but you will mostly be playing with 5-10. I don't know if it is mathematically possible to win your first run, assuming you already knew all the mechanics, because you need to unlock upgrades like memories and imaginary friends. For imaginary friends, you need to unlock their challenges and then complete the challenges to unlock them, so unlock to unlock to have another option for buffs. You unlock 1 or 2 imaginary friends per game. I have beaten the game multiple times and still have not unlocked all the challenges to unlock the imaginary friends; another review suggests just starting games and ending your turn until you die, having a few suicide runs to unlock content. This is not a good mechanic. Several of the challenges are another layer of suicide runs, because you need to do X by level Y which can hamstring you in the long run.

The game feels padded while short. I fully support shorter games -- if you have 10 hours of content, do not pad it out to 40. This has less than 10, padded both by those unlocks and by using the same content a lot within a game. The first time, this feels good as it gives you time to learn and master as new mechanics (enemy variations, cards) are introduced. Those come fairly steadily. But then you have another 100 skeletons and cats, and there are >20 levels of them, and it can become a trial of endurance both for your deck and you the player.

The story is depressing. It is meant to be. A little girl is in a downward cycle of bullying and declining mental health. The game is her battling her inner demons, although that metaphor is more informed than supported. That is, we are explicitly told these are her inner demons, but there are no metaphorical implications to the skeletons, cats, mini-bosses, etc. Why is Cerberus one of her inner demons? She likes mythology. Do the three heads stand for anything? Not really. So you get vignettes of a child being abused, along with her family feeling helpless, but only a few seconds worth of catharsis from part of the conclusion. Only two foes seem to take the metaphor seriously, including the final boss battle that is so different from the rest of the game that you can see many posts and reviews asking what is going on there.

The game describes its art as minimalist. It kind of is, and each individual piece is clear. Once you know what an enemy does, you can understand what you are seeing at a glance. But there might be 15 of them on screen at once, and armor might be indicated by a symbol on a shirt, and some of the enemies are large enough to overlap each other. It is mostly clear, but it can be a lot to take in at once, and you may not be able to see everything. By the time you have a full screen of enemies, you know enough to take it in at a glance, but I do not think it is an intentional piece of difficulty that sometimes enemies (or important parts of them) are hidden behind other enemies.

Not a bad game, but it could stand either to be shorter with less gated content or else to have more dynamic player options over the course of its length.

My personal tips:
- Shields and stealing are powerful mechanics, especially as you approach the late game.
- Having some will regain frees you up to take damage rather than playing defensively.