Chrono Ark is the hot new deckbuilder roguelike RPG
Chrono Ark is a brand-new roguelike deckbuilder that combines fast-paced, card-based combat with leveling up your party RPG-style. Although it was only released on May 3, it has already surpassed 7,084 concurrent players on Steam (Source: SteamDB) and has a Very Positive status (90% out of 7290 reviews are positive) at the time of writing. Developed and produced by Korean indie dev team Alfine, Chrono Ark is being praised for its deep creative story, art, OST and multifaceted strategic gameplay, which incorporates fresh ideas.
In the past deck-ade, a number of successful titles have put their own twist on the deckbuilding genre, including the tower-climbing roguelike Slay the Spire and the recent Poker-based Balatro, attracting loyal playerbases. Most deckbuilders focus fully on the strategic gameplay, with lore elements acting more as background flavoring. Chrono Ark however, has a fully fleshed-out story, which already sets it apart from others in the genre.
In true RPG fashion, you take on the role of main character Lucy, setting out on a quest with your party members to restore a broken world. This involves gathering time shades in the Twisted Land and ultimately restarting the Clock Tower, which will bring peace to the abandoned world once more. However, Chrono Ark is also a roguelike, so if your party is eliminated, you must start from scratch. In a similar manner to games like Dead Cells, you will discover more options as you play and gradually uncover different strategies to tackle the game, making each run a learning opportunity. Battles are card-based, with the cards you play determining what skills or perks your characters can use. In addition to the protagonist Lucy, you can have up to four characters in your party. There are 20 possible party members to choose from in total, and they each have their own 12 cards. One of the key strategies is to build a deck from your characters’ cards that has good synergy. This will hopefully allow you to quickly and efficiently play good cards on the battlefield.
Chrono Ark also allows you to level up your characters to learn new skills, equip items to boost their stats and obtain relics, which can be used to adjust gameplay in a similar manner to the ones in Slay the Spire. The game has many different buffs, mechanics and strategies to discover and play around with.
Although this may all sound complicated and daunting at first, the game gives players a variety of difficulty levels and game modes to choose from. At one end is Hope Mode, the “easy” difficulty that allows novices to play more casually and focus on experiencing the story. On the other end of the scale is Expert+ mode, which also gives you extra gameplay modifiers- for those who fancy a challenging run.
Chrono Ark’s story has already been heavily praised- it is told in the style of a visual novel. All your party members have their own personalities and complex motivations, which are gradually revealed to you during conversations with them while camping between stages. The game also has epic boss battles and emotional moments. The story encourages you to uncover the mysteries surrounding this abandoned world and the catastrophe that occurred. As you play, you will probably notice connections between information found within dialogues between characters, your current story and even records you have picked up on past runs.
Chrono Ark is available now on PC (Steam). It can be purchased at 25% off until May 17, 2024.
