Roguebook

Developed by: Abrakam Entertainment SA
Published by: Nacon

Jun 17, 2021$24.99

Embrace the challenge of a roguelike deckbuilder with unique mechanics from the developers of Faeria and Richard Garfield, creator of Magic: The Gathering™. Build a team of two heroes, unleash powerful combos and defeat the legends of the Roguebook!

Consensus

B74.7/100

Steam players83.8% positiveVery Positive4,594 reviews

Metacritic ↗78/100Users: 7/10

VG Insights estimate ↗≈138K copies · ≈$2.1M gross

What creators say

PepperHead ↗

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Roguebook (2021) is a deck-building roguelike where you control two heroes at once while uncovering tiles of a giant book with ink and brushes. He loves it and calls it the template for a good deck builder, and says it would be an instant S tier. One flaw drops it a full tier: the animations are slow, cannot be sped up in the menu, and sometimes swallow fast card inputs. He lands it at an easy A, above Monster Train, and wishes for more updates and an animation fix that could push it higher.

Liked

Blend of tactical two-character card combat with an explorable outside world (ink-and-brush tile uncovering)
Hero placement and switching adds interesting positioning gameplay
Exploration rewards: money, potions, more ink, cards and unique events that really transform the run
Five characters, any pair combo feels very different, so runs are varied almost every time
Great customization at run start, which he considers important for modern roguelikes
Phenomenal balance: almost every card is playable and strong builds feel earned through synergy hunting
Beautiful visuals and care put into animations

Disliked

Animations are too slow and there is no menu option to speed them up
Must wait for each card animation to finish before acting; fast inputs sometimes don't register
Frustration with waiting is bad enough that he stopped coming back to it despite loving it
Wishes for more updates/content after the expansion, unsure it gets any

What players say

A roguelike deckbuilder from Abrakam (Faeria) with Richard Garfield's involvement, where you pair two heroes into one shared deck and spend ink and brushes to uncover a hex-tile map page by page.

Roguebook is well regarded but not treated as a genre top-tier title. Steam sits at Very Positive (about 84% of roughly 4,600 reviews) and Metacritic critics give it 78 (Generally Favorable), with most praise going to the art, the two-hero swap system and the explorable map. Players who love it often put in 80-150 hours, but a large share of the positive reviews say it is best bought on sale, and the negatives are dominated by save-corrupting crashes and bugs, uneven balance, and a thin feel (few heroes, limited enemy variety). Developer and publisher (Nacon) support has effectively stopped according to recent Steam reviews, so the known bugs look permanent. It is a finished 1.0 release, not early access.

Players love

Art style, card art and animation are widely called gorgeous; much of it is reused and refreshed from Faeria
The two-hero system (front/back positions, block cards swapping who is in front, relics tied to one hero) is the most-cited standout mechanic
Ink and brush map exploration gives many more routing choices than the three-path Slay the Spire map, making runs feel different
Card pool is considered good and can feel breakable, with gems slotted into cards and upgrade options adding build depth
Runs take roughly an hour, a length players like, and there is a large meta-progression (pages/embellishments, 20 difficulty levels) that gives 80-100+ hours of content
Losing is cushioned by meta progression, so failed runs still unlock pages and perks
Extremely cheap on sale (frequently about $2.50-$9 with DLC), which many reviewers call one of the best value deals in the genre
Full controller support and Steam Cloud saves (per the Steam store page)

Common complaints

Balance and pacing frustrate at higher ascension levels, with input lag on top; this is the single most-upvoted negative review (65 helpful votes)
Crashes can corrupt the save file and wipe all meta progress; this is the single most repeated complaint in negative reviews, including from players with 50+ hours
Other bugs: halved game speed, 3-5 second lag between playing a card and the animation, stuck UI notifications and glitched gem icons, high CPU use, and a DLC reported as buggy
Balance is lopsided: early enemies and bosses can burst for most of your HP while some hero/relic strategies trivialise everything, and the DLC hero is described as overpowered
Only four base heroes (a fifth is paid DLC), so runs become samey and the game feels small, with limited enemies, cards and only three acts
Developer support has stopped and the online/tournament features are reported as non-functional; support emails and Discord messages reportedly go unanswered
No real plot despite some hero banter, which reviewers feel was dropped or abandoned
Synergies are often shallow or depend on RNG, so some players feel little control over building a deck

Can feel tedious

Map exploration is slow and grindy: players feel forced to clear as many fights as they can for ink and gold, then walk back and forth across the map
Healing is scarce and hard to manage in the early game, so some runs become attrition grinds
Long-term meta progression drags; after roughly 8-20 hours players say they see the grind, and after about 100 hours the remaining unlocks mostly just raise difficulty
Losing a run to a bug or corrupted save after a long session
Needing to pay real money to unlock the fifth hero
Higher ascension levels feel like a balance and pacing slog rather than fair challenge, even to Slay the Spire veterans

What's unique

Open hex map uncovered with limited ink and brushes, instead of a branching node tree; it is a resource-management layer of its own
Two-hero team sharing one deck, with front/back positioning that changes which card effects apply and who takes damage
Gem-slot card upgrades and difficult card removal, so you improve cards rather than thin the deck (a larger deck is actually rewarded with passive bonuses)
Fog-of-war 'book pages' setting with seer tiles, lever events and tournaments that feed a persistent meta progression
Design pedigree: Faeria developers plus Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield, funded on Kickstarter in 2019

Players want

Fix the save corruption and crash bugs and optimise performance/animation lag
Rebalance early-game damage versus block and healing, and relic pricing (legendaries and the Rose relic are called overpriced)
Add more heroes to the base game, and more enemies and cards, rather than selling a hero as DLC
Quality-of-life additions: skippable intro cutscene each run, larger card text option for accessibility, Steam Workshop or mod support, easier card removal or clearer accession system
Give the map exploration less randomness (for example guaranteed access to key upgrades) and trim the back-and-forth walking
Add a built-in way to retry or undo, since players currently rely on quitting to menu and continuing as a save-scum trick

Summarised from Steam reviews and community discussion.