• Price: $24.99 USD (digital; multi-language physical available on Play-Asia)
• Developer/Publisher: INTI CREATES
• Release Date: October 24, 2024

I’ve been looking forward to Card-en-Ciel, so I was excited to check out the demo they just released on Switch. The game is a roguelite card-battling RPG that uses music to enhance the turn-based battles.

As Neon – the hilariously-nicknamed “Gaming Chair Detective” – enter the world of Rust Tactics, a “full-dive” VR game that has recently had problems with unwanted outside data finding itself into the game somehow. The environments and battle screens in this digital world are reminiscent of Mega Man Battle Network, which I quite like.

You need to fight through several floors of enemies using your card deck. Cards have 2 main functions: attacking enemies, and moving out of enemy range. Attacking costs points to use, while using a card to move doesn’t cost points but does place it in the discard pile.

I like that we can use several cards to move more than once. Some strategy is involved because you have to keep track of the remaining cards in your hand that will allow you to move out of enemy range after using cards to attack.

Enemies display timers that indicate how many actions you have until they’ll attack; the game shows you the parts of the grid that will be affected ahead of time. You need to move out of that zone when the timers hit 1, or else Neon’s cute little chibi-fied avatar will take damage.

It’s possible to prevent enemy actions by using cards with the Break function. Once you’ve reduced an enemy’s Break gauge to zero, not only can they not do anything for a turn, but they also take twice the usual damage – and you get extra Cost Points to use!

From what I’ve seen so far, it doesn’t seem like enemies can Break you, but they can have Muses sing to inflict negative effects on you and your allies. If you defeat the enemy Muse, it gets rid of those effects and you get to recruit the Muse for yourself. I enjoyed all of the Japanese Muse songs in the demo. 🎶

Muse cards are passive enhancements that require you to meet certain conditions to activate them for the duration of the current battle. Having a Muse sing for you makes it possible to use regular cards’ special abilities without losing them for good.

There are a lot of different factors to take into account in order to emerge victorious from battle. You get to choose 1 of 3 possible card rewards for winning each battle, and some of them come with Cheat Code effects! I think it’s pretty neat how adding a card with a Cheat Code to your deck will also apply that effect to other copies of that card.

You start with a new deck every time you enter a dungeon, so it’s important to earn some new cards by winning battles and finding the occasional treasure chest. However, it’s best to battle as few enemies as possible because the amount of turns you take in a dungeon affects your final score.

The less turns you take, the higher your dungeon score will be. Higher scores provide you with more “Decode Tokens” that you can use to make Neon stronger. It seems like you get a really good Plugin if you spend your tokens on all of the Plugins offered for each time Neon has leveled up.

The demo includes 3 dungeons, and you can play through them multiple times in different difficulty modes if you’d like. Easy Mode allows players to continue on in a dungeon up to three times if they’re defeated, while other modes do not have a “continue” option.

I really like what I’ve seen of Card-en-Ciel so far; the gameplay was engaging, and I liked the entertaining references made in each dungeon. There’s nice voice acting in both English and Japanese, with voiced lines for the main characters and the cards too.

The demo doesn’t include all of the game’s features, but they indicated that 1v1 battles and deck construction dungeons will be in the full version of the game. Until its release in October, players can continue to enjoy the demo and carry over their save data to the full version.