Even if you’re familiar with deckbuilding games, the chances are you’ve never played one quite like Burn With Me. With nights drawing in, it’s a great time to take a walk on the dark side of the street with this new, spooky card game. Hold our hands in the darkness, as we light the ritual candles and review Burn With Me!
What is Burn With Me?
A horror game which blends cozy art with video footage for a truly off-kilter aesthetic, Burn With Me is a deckbuilding game with very unique mechanics. You’ll assist anthropomorphic animal students, with the support of their Teacher, in performing occult rituals. As you successfully complete rituals, your students unlock more and more dark secrets, and the creepy narrative continues to unfold.
How to Play Burn With Me
In each round, you’ll have a specific points target to reach, or your ritual will fail and your run will, technically, end. That said, you can retry from a certain save point, though this can sometimes be several rituals before your current one. You’ll be summoning cards, fighting against deadly creatures and taking part in tactile mini-games as you make your way through the game’s story.
The card mechanics are based around clever timing and positioning. You’ll gain bonuses and effects from placing cards from your hand around a pentagram in a specific order, or position. The order of cards when they’re still in your hand can sometimes be important too. There’s a spatial puzzle to maximise on every turn, in every round.
Is Burn With Me Fun to Play?
The robust tutorial in Burn With Me does a great job of teaching you the basic mechanics. It then gets out of your way as quickly as possible! However, you’ll soon find that you really do have to pay attention to where and when you place your cards. Failure can happen often if you don’t maximise your point scoring opportunities every time you play a card.
It makes for really compelling, unique gameplay. Add the layers of the narrative and the unsettling, mixed media aesthetic and it feels like an experience unlike any other.
Though it’s not the first horror-themed deckbuilder by any means, it’s one that does things entirely its own way. It feels like games at the scary end of the spectrum really take pains to be different not just in their theming, but also in their mechanics too. It’s in good company, with the unique likes of spooky-themed card games such as Inscryption, The Spirit Lift and Deck of Haunts.
The Card Gamer Verdict
There’s a brilliantly evocative, dark ambience in Burn With Me, and its compelling, unusual gameplay makes it a unique experience.
From an audiovisual perspective, Burn With me also sets itself apart. The developers have blended hand-drawn, cutesy characters with a dark theme, adding artistically enhanced video footage for an even creepier and more unsettling vibe.
The spatial puzzle-style basis of Burn With Me’s gameplay is immensely absorbing, and scratches an itch you may not even know you had.
Burn With Me is available now on Steam:
