Trials Of Fire, besides having such a generic sounding title that you forget it every time you’re not looking directly at the words, is a turn-based, single-player, deck-building, choice-driven, procedurally-generated, top-down, role-playing strategy game, set in a post-cataclysmic, dark fantasy world. It’s part The Road, part Tolkien offcuts, as you guide a miserable band of fighters through a blasted wasteland in search of a series of Emerald MacGuffins that will reignite a fallen civilisation and bring balance to the something something.
Familiar questing tropes aside, this is really good. The world is presented as a thick ledger, a beefy tome of a storybook that when cracked open reveals the landscapes and battlefields on which your little dudes do all of their adventuring and scrapping. Pencil sketches extrude themselves into stone arches and crumbling ruins, rising out from the page like a psychedelic pop-up book. Inventory and equipment screens are found by leafing back and forth through bookmarks and tabs. The unwavering dedication to this nested reality perspective is impressive, and from the title screen to the moment you quit back to the desktop, the game never pulls away from the vantage point of standing above a book about the time three people went on a big walk and got into a bunch of fights with rat people.
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