MALYS

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It's a gloomy day. Dark, lead-coloured clouds litter the sky. The city is quiet, if you discount the occasional interruption in the eerie silence by a distant sobbing. It's not a good place. Hell opened its gates and all the demons came crawling from the pits. And this isn't a metaphor, bub. I light a cigarette. Take a swig of the mass wine. It's a shitty day to be an exorcists...

This is MALYS. You are father Noah. A gruff, no-nonsense, square-jawed priest on a mission to expunge evil wherever it takes root. On your trusty bike, you'll traverse the haunted city to banish demons, seek dubious help, and accrue power through prayer to face the ultimate evil at the end of the road. Gather powerful relics, empower your faith, and craft a well-oiled deck of chants and prayers to face the infernal enemies! Yeah. The premise is cool as heck - Constantine tilts his hat and shoots you a wry smirk.

And yes, I am gnawing my nails, grinding my teeth as I suffer while I enjoy this game. Sounds contradictory? Because my experience with MALYS is a story of contrast. Beautiful art, interesting narrative, well-written characters clash with tedious systems, horrible pacing, and a limited scope of options to play with. Now, let me explain...

THE ART OF SIN

The game art and story are both fantastic. Stylish, well executed, seeping with atmosphere.

MALYS is a beautiful game. There are no two ways about it. Art is stellar - monochrome, noir city contrasts with the misshapen forms of blood-tinged demons. Their nightmarish visage is a blend of cosmic horrors with gnarled flesh and bones. Miracles and Light glow in the darkness, seeping through our cards and relics. Illustrations are sharp and moody, locations grimy and dank with urban decay. And this game manages to look stellar while also retaining clarity of information. Interfaces are neat and clean; you should never be confused about what does what.

Then there are the soundscapes. The music wriggles under your skin; the tension when a Greater Demon is revealed is palpable. Fantastic voice acting fuels the immersion. Every time Father Noah bellows his exorcism or demands a demonic entity to reveal its name, I feel it in my bones. Crunches of attacks, holy chants, and prayers in the air as I juggle cards and try to get my engine online are a blessing to the ears. It is a stunning game to behold.

SPEAK OF THE DEVIL...

I must also praise the attempt at innovation that this game proudly pushes to its forefront. The resource management system is curious and clever. You need to burn cards to light your blessed candles and use their light to cast your cards. Some cards have additional effects when burned, and your lit candles can carry over between turns too, adding a bit of strategic depth about preparing your next turn to shine. Demons can mess with them too, which is a mark of a well-implemented feature - everything can interact with it, to a degree.

The core fun of the experience lies in fighting the big baddies. Greater Demons begin hidden, their true obscured by sigils of Solomon's Key. By dealing damage to them, you can reveal their true form and begin the encounter in earnest. But even then, the combat isn't straightforward. After you bash through their initial health pool, they go frantic, waking up their host to consume it. Now a race begins, in which you must protect the host from its demise while chipping away at the demon once more to ensure victory in the name of the Lord! This feature is fun - once. Then it becomes tedious and slow, making each battle a horrible slog that lasts forever. And that is even if your little card engine works well enough to push through the attrition.

DEVIL IN THE DETAILS

Revealing a demon name is great fun. Shame what follows is a tedious slog.

I could forgive a game this stylish a lot. It has the trappings of such a polished title, after all. Excellent art, fun writing, original premise. As mentioned above, who doesn't want the thrill of being a Constantine-like gruff priest spanking demon tushies with the power of random denomination Christ!? But alas, as much as I could gush about how lovely this game feels and looks, this does not translate that much to gameplay. When I was gnawing on thoughts about what bothers me so much about MALYS loop, it is how the developers have made the game all about fear. And I mean the game is in a constant state of dread about the player becoming strong. And so, it gets nasty about it. To a frankly staggering number of logs, it tosses under your legs.

Before I dig into the details, let me tell you about a run I just had. Before the first big baddy of the first biome, I had multiple fights and a couple of shops. I selected zero card rewards. Why? Because they were all shite. Not only pathetically weak, but also not fitting the deck game plan whatsoever. So the reward for each combat turned out to lack a reward. Lovely! Then I entered shop number one. Woo! Fresh cards. A quick glance and yup - they are all also horribly bad for my deck. Well, at least I can save some of my Faith (the game's prime currency) for the next shop with trinkets! Oh too bad - the trinkets are impossibly expensive and I could only afford one; the worst one of the bunch that did nothing for my build. And so I reached the final boss of the stage without adding a single card to my deck or acquiring a trinket. They were that shoddy or that expensive.

In other deck-builders, I guess I acquired a bad habit of being spoiled. When other games offer artefacts as a reward, they usually show me three and let me pick one free of charge. When they give me cards, oft I can afford all of them... And if none looks like they fit my style, I can spend currency to reroll them for a new bunch! Nothing like that in here. You're either lucky and spot a card that can work for you or just sigh in resignation and move on. Then there are random events - the ones marked with tantalising question marks. Each and every time across multiple runs I stepped into them, they were negative outcomes. It was so frequent that my brain recoded them as Traps, and since then I have avoided picking paths with them. Rough.

MALYS hates you and isn't shy about making sure you know it. The lack of player agency in shaping their deck is a grave sin for a deck-builder, one that I just cannot absolve in any confession. The cards are weak. The upgrades? Both expensive, rare, and a mixed bag. Trinkets? You had better make sure you never spend any faith before entering a shop with trinkets. It's the thorniest design setup I have ever played in this genre, and I do not like it.

DO YOU KNOW THE DEFINITION OF INSANITY?

See the issue? Nice Relics. Shame you cannot afford a single one.

And so we come to the core of the issue. If the game systems are working against you. If you have three starting decks that offer the only three working strategies. And if your agency as a player to expand your tactics are stifled at every corner... how well do you think the game retains player attention? Story is fun to read, yeah. Art is stellar. But all that pales thanks to the fact that each run is very, very same'ish. You opt to have a tight, streamlined deck anyway that will never wildly go beyond the confines of its starting premise. You hope your darnedest to get a single trinket worth a damn or a couple of cards that synergise with your starting artefact. And then all you have to do is stick to your pre-made game plan and hope the RNGesus is with you. Amen.

Of course, this leads to burnout, and quickly so. MALYS doesn't have the legs to stand on. As mentioned before, every combat encounter is the same in its core. There are no wacky status effects, no crazy builds to diversify into. You get a big number card that smashes big damage into spooky demon faces and cycles through your deck to keep using that card over and over again. While your 'supporting setup' of shields and heals is there to make sure you can brush aside the simple patterns of demon attacks. Sure, big baddies have their unique little gimmicks. Silly summons to pay attention to. Little special icons to not forget about. But once you see all 3-4 moves a demon can brandish at you, every combat becomes a slog through the paces. Shield here, heal there, smash now. Rinse, repeat.

Now, you could say that most deck-builders aim to reach that state, to have your engine set and unleash it upon the world. But here this experience is greatly diminished by lacklustre deck-building options and the extreme slowness of the combat encounters, taking forever to finish. You might need to go through 10-20 cycles of doing the same shit over and over until you finally chip away at the demons' health pool and can trudge forward. It is... boring. The greatest offence of all.

SAVING GRACE

It all sounds grim, and yes, it is. There is also a strange glimmer of hope that I am both grateful for and perplexed about. Buried in the Settings, you can see two special modes, turned off by default: PIOUS and UNSHAKEABLE. The first gives you more faith - the in-run currency - and raises it each time you die and fail, making new runs easier. The latter makes you more durable, and again, keeps ramping up as you keep failing. Those are great accessibility options and I am curious why they aren't present as a visible pick at the start of the run, instead being sequesterd to the Settings...? Because they feel like they were an afterthought, a patched-in thing at the last moment. Like someone realised they made a rough game that feels a bit too nasty around the edges and needed to put in some quick band-aids to let the players blast through it - eventually. Don't get me wrong. I like that these options exist. But I would be more enthused by them if they were either made known by default or presented in a way as a core game loop feature, not a "Oops, you suck, here, cop that easy win brother" pity party.

And so I could not recommend MALYS. Not entirely, at least. It is a beautiful game with an awesome and well-executed premise. It has some sparks of fun and innovative mechanics. It can even be enjoyable to play if those rare runs where everything clicks just right and you get your cards to sing in the way you need them to! But the whole experience, for the most part, was more frustrating than enjoyable. At every corner, MALYS tries to sap the joy out of playing it. Shitty cards that you must dismiss with no ability to re-roll them. Horrible pricing for your 'rewards' that will keep your runs bare. Punitive random events. It will test your patience - that alone wouldn't be a big deal if it tested it while retaining the fun factor. And sadly, I cannot say it does.