Gordian Quest

It's deeply disappointing to play Gordian Quest and encounter the amount of UI-driven issues that permeate its menus, because it has some really cool stuff going on beneath its bristly, frustrating outer shell. It's decidedly easier to pick up than most other deckbuilders, and combat has a good flow to it, with lots of combinations and deck variations to explore. Unfortunately, it's a horrendous Switch port that makes even simple things difficult. It's worth your time, just maybe not on the Switch.

Gordian Quest is a game of two sides. On the one hand, it features an absolutely brilliant, deep, and immensely entertaining tactical combat system with enormous character variety and replayability. On the other hand, it’s let down by a boring and generic story, a disastrous tutorial, and a frustrating spike in difficulty that forces you into a monotonous grind. It’s an RPG with deck-building elements, yet paradoxically, the RPG elements (story, world) are its weakest aspects. However, if you can get past the initial confusion and don’t mind repeating content, you’ll be rewarded with one of the best combat systems on the market.

Gordian Quest is an ambitious fantasy RPG that offers a vast campaign, exciting auto-generated maps, and turn-based combat that offers near endless hours of gameplay with its broad selection of battle decks.

Some cool concepts and art for a roguelike deckbuilder that feels a bit different collide a bit with lacking controls and clarity

Games should exist and designers should always make games but Gordian Quest offers nothing new and does nothing exceptionally well.

With cards to collect and nodes to explore, Gordian Quest brings some of my favorite rogue-lite mechanics into a persistent world for an epic adventure.

Gordian Quest is a straightforward and fun game. I liked it all while I played. But I also kept wishing I was playing on my PC, which is… probably the game’s biggest weakness. It feels like a PC game ported to a console (which, let’s be real, it is) and it is a bit limited as a result of that. However, if you want the game in portable form and don’t have (or want) a Steam Deck? It’s a great addition. Sure, you will have to wrestle with the game’s interface a little bit and there will be the odd moment where you feel like something should have worked but you couldn’t see a bit of text that indicated otherwise. But the game is good enough that a bit of interface jank hardly pulls it down, in the end.

Overall, Gordian Quest does a great job in implementing various gameplay elements and making them work together. While the Campaign Mode could have featured a better narrative and variety of activities, it still serves as a good entry point in the game as a long tutorial of sorts. From there, the game features a lot of replayability due to the number of classes and skills. As a deckbuilding RPG, Gordian Quest does a great job with the deckbuilding portion and is worth a look for fans of the genre.

Gordian Quest draws inspiration from old-school RPGs, Dungeons & Dragons, and deck-builders like Slay the Spire, yet it proudly stands on its own. With deep, addictive gameplay and endless replayability with multiple play modes, Gordian Quest boldly blazes its own trail. It’s rare that a game can draw from so many sources and have the end product feel so refined, yet this game delivers in spades. I can’t recommend this game enough to fellow deck-builder and RPG lovers.

Gordian Quest is focused on mechanics to both its advantage and detriment. For a player who has not explored the card and tactics space a lot, this is a perfect experience both as an introduction and for long-term engagement. For someone who has tried out a lot of titles in the genre, this game is a little too by the book for its own good.