As We Descend Seems To Capture Those Magical Early Hours Of Your Favorite Civ Game
The roguelike is quickly becoming one of my favorite genres and I’ve made no secret how much I love tabletop gaming, so it comes at no surprise that I enjoyed playing As We Descend, the debut title of developer Box Dragon. As We Descend is an upcoming roguelike deckbuilding game that incorporates elements from strategy games.
In As We Descend, you play as a senior member of a city, directing your home’s forces to fix failing technology, venture into monster-infested areas to find resources, and mount defenses for approaching threats. Your actions–both navigating the city and fighting in turn-based combat encounters–are dictated by the cards you’ve collected and upgraded in your deck, injecting a sense of curated randomness into each attempt to protect the city. You must find a way to protect the city as it slowly descends into the planet, uncovering secrets to this post-apocalyptic world. Each failed run sees you start over in the city centuries later, attempting to build upon whatever systems were left behind by the previous civilization embodying the city.
As you descend further, you’ll build your ideal deck.
Ahead of the launch of the demo for As We Descend, I got a chance to play the roguelike game and simultaneously interview game director Kevin Chang. As I marveled at the game’s incredible art direction and storytelling hooks and laughed with malicious glee at combining the right order of cards to demolish the dangerous-looking demonic forces attempting to breach the city’s walls, our conversation touched on Chang’s background in tabletop gaming design, how As We Descend captures the exciting opening hours of a Civilization game, and how the narrative elements of the game almost didn’t happen.