Vault of the Void is a fast-paced roguelike deckbuilder where the power is in your hands. Continuously customise your deck, crafting powerful combos and ingenious strategies. Upgrade your cards with Void Stones, infusing them with new abilities to help defeat the minions of The Void!
Vault of the Void is a deck-building roguelike with an unusual stress-meter mechanic, where managing stress matters as much as health and higher stress brings more enemies. PepperHead says plainly that he did not like it, even though it has very positive reviews and he has played a lot of deckbuilders. He found the gameplay boring and the art and environments unappealing, and felt the game did not feel alive during card fights. He played about 10 hours and concedes that more time with different card combinations might have changed his view. He places it in high D tier and stresses that D tier means not for him rather than a bad game.
Liked
Has a unique gimmick in the stress meter, which adds a resource to manage besides health
Pretty unique design choices overall
Acknowledges the very positive reviews and that the game may be good for others
Concedes that discovering different card combinations might make it more interesting
Disliked
Gameplay felt boring to him
Art style disliked
Fights and the card board felt lifeless and not visually interesting
World environment not visually pleasing
Stress mechanic is complicated to explain and the game is complex, which contributed to it not clicking
Tier list Part 2 (2024)
Vault of the Void is a fairly standard deck-building roguelike that he re-evaluated after playing it longer. He originally tried it for a few hours, disliked it and placed it in C tier, but viewer comments and his own deck-building design video research pushed him to revisit it. He now finds it really solid, with a lot of content and replayability. He moves it up to A tier (described as low A), admitting he was wrong before.
Liked
Very solid, well-executed core deck-building loop
Lots of small mechanical details that make moment-to-moment play interesting
Large amount of content: many cards and artifacts
High replayability
Has its own vibe despite similarity to Slay the Spire
One of the few deck builders without unique gimmicks that still succeeds just by doing the basics well
Disliked
Lacks really unique mechanics, which is normally risky for deck builders due to Slay the Spire comparisons
Fairly similar to Slay the Spire in some aspects
His first impression was poor, suggesting it may not hook players quickly (he partly blames his own mood and short playtime)
What players say
A roguelike deckbuilder from Spider Nest Games built around planning and player agency: fixed 20-card decks, full map vision, deck swaps between fights, and Void Stone card upgrades.
Players rate it Very Positive on Steam (about 92% of roughly 3,000 reviews locally, 93% on the store page), and a loud minority of genre veterans call it their favourite deckbuilder, often ahead of Slay the Spire and Monster Train. Praise centres on control over RNG, build variety and depth. Critics have barely covered it: Metacritic holds one listed review (God is a Geek, 70/100) and no aggregate score. The main complaint is front-loaded complexity, a weak tutorial and a busy UI, so it is seen as a deep cut for experienced players rather than an entry point. It left Early Access (Nov 2020) for 1.0 on Oct 4 2022, then added a new class and kept updating: a Nightmare update, a Halloween update mentioned by reviewers, and The Weaver DLC on Oct 30 2025 (87% positive, 62 reviews). Mobile ports (iOS, Android) and a Switch listing exist. Steam-revenue-calculator estimates about $1.5M gross and $444k net (Boxleiter-style, not audited).
Players love
High agency over randomness: full map visibility, intent shown before enemies act, and control over draw order and card rewards
Swapping cards in and out of your deck between fights, so builds can be tuned and rethought constantly
Four classes plus a DLC class, each with three distinct starting decks and spells, so runs feel different from the first fight
Retain and purge/energy systems that reward sequencing and turn-order planning
Large content pool: 440+ cards, 320+ artifacts, Void Stone upgrades, and 50 challenge coins with modifier-based and goofy empowered runs
Scalable difficulty, including a customisable Impossible mode, which fans of hard Slay the Spire ascensions enjoy
Cross-save between platforms, singled out by players as underrated
Reviewers say it is polished and more fleshed out than a Slay the Spire clone; one calls it a quiet technical pleasure with lots of depth
Repeatedly called an underrated hidden gem that gets buried on Steam and rarely appears on best-of-genre lists
Common complaints
Steep learning curve: around 20 mechanics arrive at once and the tutorial explains them poorly (discard vs purge vs exhaust is a common confusion)
Busy UI with heavy mental arithmetic, which some find hurts readability
Mechanics feel more complicated than necessary just to be different from Slay the Spire (negative reviewers' view)
Mandatory 20-card deck and near-mandatory starter cards prevent thin-deck strategies and make starter cards hard to drop
Killed enemies still deal their damage until the whole fight ends, which players find counter-intuitive
Theme, plot and art are described as generic or bog-standard, with only serviceable visuals
Steam Deck and controller bugs reported, including missing map art, invisible portraits and audio dropouts
Some translation, typo and crash or save-recovery threads on the Steam forum
Several reviewers, including players past Impossible 20+, find it solid but unexciting or lacking variety, and prefer Slay the Spire or Monster Train
Can feel tedious
Learning the dense keyword system in the first runs, which some bounced off (several recommend the free demo first)
Constant deck micromanagement between fights, which some players find unappealing
Mental maths and planning overhead on every turn
Starter-card dependence makes deck-building feel less free than in Slay the Spire
Bare Bones challenge coin called out as the one unfun piece even by a 200-hour fan
What's unique
Fixed 20-card deck that you can restructure between every fight, instead of an ever-growing deck
Retained cards can be deleted for energy or mana on later turns
Full map vision plus enemy previews before battle, reducing hidden-information gambles
Void Stones and runes inserted into cards as a customisation layer, alongside potions, relics and spells
Reset-fight option to brute-force a puzzle or undo a mistake
The Weaver DLC class commands a team of 25+ pets across five slots with Weave and Unravel mechanics
Players want
A better tutorial that introduces keywords gradually and explains the core mechanics in depth
A cleaner, less cluttered UI with clearer numbers and names
Fixes for Steam Deck and controller compatibility bugs
More language support and localisation fixes (forum requests)
Clearer item and ability descriptions (forum reports on Zeal tree confusion and an equipment misrepresentation bug)
Some fans single out the Bare Bones challenge coin as unfun, suggesting balance tuning
Summarised from Steam reviews and community discussion.
Tier list Part 1 (2023)
Vault of the Void is a deck-building roguelike with an unusual stress-meter mechanic, where managing stress matters as much as health and higher stress brings more enemies. PepperHead says plainly that he did not like it, even though it has very positive reviews and he has played a lot of deckbuilders. He found the gameplay boring and the art and environments unappealing, and felt the game did not feel alive during card fights. He played about 10 hours and concedes that more time with different card combinations might have changed his view. He places it in high D tier and stresses that D tier means not for him rather than a bad game.
Liked
Disliked