HELLCARD is one of those games that is genuinely fun right up until it suddenly isn’t. I played a decent amount of it and overall enjoyed the core gameplay loop. The art style is great, the characters are fun, and putting builds together can feel really satisfying. There were multiple runs where my group absolutely steamrolled the game; clearing 5–7 late-game floors without taking damage, beating multiple bosses on the same floor flawlessly, etc.
And then the game would suddenly throw a floor at us where enemies open with 70+ damage on turn one and completely flatten the run with basically no warning. That’s the issue that kept coming back: the balance feels wildly inconsistent. It’s hard to feel motivated to keep experimenting or improving when you can have an objectively powerful build dominating the game one minute and then get instantly deleted by a random difficulty spike the next. The problem isn’t that the game is hard. The problem is that certain encounters feel disconnected from the rest of the game’s balance and pacing.

I honestly think these kinds of roguelike/deckbuilder games are probably very difficult to design and tune correctly, and there’s clearly a really fun game underneath all of this. But the frustration eventually outweighs the fun. I got around 10–20 enjoyable hours out of it, but I can’t fully recommend it because the balancing issues eventually slam the brakes on what otherwise could have been a great game.

The game is good, the idea is good, the visuals are doing its job.
Whats the problem then?
devs are working on the next game while this game still lacks so much starting with bugs and/or intended but not explained things.
for example if one player lags a big another player can just lose the card they are about to cast or for example there is a card that does damage per arrows, but you dont have arrows which should give 0 damage, but you can amplify it with different items and mark, but you still do 0 damage no matter what, etc.
another problem are bosses. you can make a build that cast lots of 0 mana spells per turn only to end up not being able to cast almost any at a boss without any warning, you just need to check the boss by searching the web basically

1) Not really balanced across the table.
2) Even less balanced in a duo compared to solo / three-stack.