Let me be clear: the game is HARD! Even in easy mode.
Is the best deckbuilder I ever played (besides Slay the Spire) the art is outstanding, the world is well build, and had a lot of lore, the card mechanics are of the best in a deckbuilder like EVER! it's seen unforgiven at first, but when you take the grasp of in, things start to work, addictive as hell! Prepare yourself to die a lot!
This game is highly underrated IMO. The game is beautiful, the combat is extremely deep, and story is really compelling. In addition, the developer is extremely active on Discord and Reddit. If you enjoy the deck building rogue-like genre or wanna give it a try, definitely pick this up.
What I love about Nowhere Prophet is that it combines the turn-based deck-building genre with the rogue-lite survival genre. Every game of combat you have access to two decks- one has your convoy (creature) cards and the other has your leader (spells) cards. There is a stunning amount of variety of cards and strategies at your disposal. In combat, you don't just have to manage your life points but you have to make sure your units don't die. If your unit is killed in two games of combat without healing, it is lost forever. This unit management system makes every game of combat incredibly tense as you can't sacrifice units willy-nily. On top of this, you have to consistently manage how much food and hope that your convoy has. Especially in the hardest difficulty, Doomed, you have to carefully consider ever tile you choose to move to and every single game of combat. The game also includes a highly original Indian-inspired approach to the post-apocalyptic genre, bold art, and great replayability (I have put at least 200 hours in to this game).
Please play this game. I have no idea why the user and critic scores are so low. (On Opencritic the game gets an 84; this is very different from the 73 that it gets on Metacritic)
I think that this is truly a unique game and I would recommend that if you are a fan of this type of genre then I think you should give this game a try.
This one has OK gameplay and style. Games are pretty long though, 1.5-3 hours per run. But there's where the trouble comes in. The game can be punishing the way roguelikes are, but each run is too long to learn things the hard way. And the losses can be extremely unfair. In a good hard game you will lose and lose but want to keep playing, a bad hard game will only make you feel cheated. This one is the latter.
Nowhere Prophet sounds like a great game on paper: roguelike card-battling strategy game in an interesting setting filled with tough choices ... but it falls so flat for so much promise. It attempts to channel some parts of games like Slay the Spire but badly misfires: like Slay the Spire you are saddled with cards that cost an increasing amount to remove from your deck. But unlike Slay the Spire, the amount of cards that you start your deck with is too large to be wieldy and you find the use of some cards so counter-productive that using them is suicide. Why? Because your actual combat cards - your followers - can only die twice in combat before their card is REMOVED from your deck. So you find that the AI opponent specializes in attacking your cards rather than your character ... which is a hideously bad mechanic as the only way to acquire new followers is to spend the SAME CURRENCY you need to hoard to remove leader cards. Want to buy that Legendary card with great stats and wonderful combat buffs? Well, don't play him unless you are certain he won't die. Yes, you can heal your cards, but that mechanic is so rarely encountered in rest camps compared to the number of battles you fight (we did say this was a roguelike, right? So pretty much there are battles and bad things happening everywhere ... even after you beat the boss at the end of each chapter) that you pretty much have an endless churn of combat followers, which dilutes any strategic deck-building you may want to do. The price of combat is so high, so affecting, that it overwhelms the permadeath mechanic and instead just leaves you frustrated at how whimsical and brittle the system is. And that is on the easy difficulty. I'll freely admit I didn't even bother on harder difficulties. I couldn't glean much fun on the easy one, and that after several "lives" and new game starts after dying.
The gist here is to "level" up and unlock new perks that increase your character's chance of survival, while simultaneously opening up new starting decks ("convoys") and higher powered buffs/de-buffs. And that I can appreciate. But unlike Slay the Spire, where you can learn to beat the bosses with minor modifications to your deck and even starting cards have some use, you will find enemies (particularly bosses) have a depth of cards that you would drool over. Buffs which you cannot acquire are played by your enemies 3 or 4 times ... sometimes in 1 turn. After many hours playing I realized the reason the enemies go after your followers rather than generally attacking you is that there decks are so much better they would wipe the floor with you if they actually played like a human. That level of gimping is simply ridiculous. You aren't meant to win. You are meant to grind. Slay the Spire allows you to craft a deck that is focused. Nowhere Prophet throws random cards at you and then kills a good portion of what you choose under the guise of being a roguelike. In a roguelike you are meant to learn the way to win by struggle. In Nowhere Prophet you only learn to delete the game.
Nowhere Prophet is a roguelike with nice visuals and solid effort put into dialogue choices, in the process the devs however forgot to think about replay-ability. The game lacks varied starting options, enemy types are few - and due to more or less RNG card acquisition, building dedicated archetype decks doesn't work. Yet, the game is easy enough to play it through in my first ever attempt. It wasn't a bad experience, but I have no incentive to ever play it again - which makes me feel like this isn't a roguelike, but rather a relatively short adventure game.
SummaryPrepare your decks and go on a pilgrimage through the wasteland. Nowhere Prophet is a unique single-player card game. Travel across randomly generated maps and lead your followers in deep tactical combat. Discover new cards and build your deck as you explore this strange, broken world.