Demon's Mirror Review

Demon’s Mirror is a hybrid puzzle-RPG game that combines elements of card-battlers and match-3 games. When you hear that a game like this is match-3, Puzzle Quest or one of its many knock-offs probably comes to mind, but Demon’s Mirror’s take on match-3 is unique.

When you start playing the game things will look a bit familiar if you’ve played puzzle-RPGs before. There’s an overworld map with icons representing battles, merchants, random events, and the like, and you have some choice as to the path you take to make your way from one end of the map to the other. With each move you trigger the event on the square you enter. Non-combat events are pretty brief – browse a merchant’s wares or read a short text description of an encounter. The latter will give you your choice of an action to take in response, each of which comes with a bonus or penalty that is revealed after your choice is made.

Things will begin to look a lot less familiar when you enter into your first battle. The match-3 board does not dominate the screen, but rather sits to one side. The bottom of the screen shows your hand of cards randomly drawn from your deck. Each illustrated card includes a description of its effect when played and the action points required to play the card.

Your first impulse will be to start trying to move gems on the board, but you’ll quickly find that you can’t do that. Gems on the board can only be manipulated by playing certain cards from your hand. You’ll also probably notice that some gems may already be aligned in rows or columns of three or more, but that they’re not automatically eliminated. This is because the game matches gems based on chains of gems including those that are diagonally adjacent. To trigger a chain you must trace the chain on the board yourself, an action that requires a bit of thought so that you can maximize the length of the chain without passing through the same gem twice. Once the chain is traced, the gems are eliminated, the gaps are filled by falling gems as you’d expect, and the effect of the gems you selected – dealing damage to enemies, adding levels to your damage shield, etc. – are applied. You won’t be able to keep executing chains until you can no longer find any, though. Using the board comes at an action point cost that increases with each play.

Your enemies have access to the board, but they are not also building chains. Some enemies have the ability to make things more difficult for you by replacing gems with dark clouds that need to be removed by chaining them, essentially wasting one of your board plays. Others drop bombs or other items on the board with countdown timers, forcing you to include them in chains in an attempt to eliminate them before they can trigger their effects.

Playing your cards right is also important, some manipulate the board, others attack enemies, while others bestow buffs and debuffs. You’ll never have enough action points to play your entire hand and do everything on the board that you’d like to, and the order in which you play your cards and create chains can lead to different outcomes, so each round requires thought and planning. The game does give you a little help in this regard by cluing you in on the type of move each enemy is plotting for the next turn, so if you see a number of attacks headed your way you can try to mitigate the damage by concentrating on building up your shield.

There’s a surprising amount of tactical depth to the core gameplay, but the game adds even more variables to the mix. The starting character you select will determine your deck, and the deck you have will determine the style of play you’ll need to adopt. Cards can be upgraded, and new cards can be obtained and added to your deck. There are artifacts that bestow various unique bonuses or that can be triggered by certain actions such as clearing all attack gems from the board in one chain, and one time use scrolls that can be a lifesaver if used at the right moment. There are a variety of enemies, and contending with their unique attack and defense actions, and they each have their own various status and board effects that they can use to throw a wrench in your gameplay. Not only does each run feel unique, every battle does as well. And then there is the game’s rouge-like element, which will always have you aware that a tactical mistake will not just cost you the battle, but will end your run as well.

Because of the unique way that the game blends the effects of its cards with its gem board, it took me a run or two to really understand what was going on. After that, though, I began to appreciate how well the gameplay mechanics work together and really started to enjoy the game. If you enjoy games like this, like me you’ll probably find yourself playing just one more battle until you find that you’ve just put a few hours into the game.