Welcome back to Save State, where I actually ordered copies of Lost in Blue 2 and Lost in Blue 3 for my Nintendo DS. Unfortunately, due to shipping times and playing copious amounts of Baldur’s Gate 3 with Fresh Look columnist Neal Sayatovich over the long holiday weekend, I haven’t had enough time to sink my teeth into Lost in Blue 2 long enough to speak about what cool things that game does. On the other hand, during down time I have been playing a new deck building roguelike called Chrono Ark that recently went on sale on the Steam platform at the time of writing this, and that title has been a complete trip for me.

Chrono Ark is a roguelike deck builder set in a twisted world that is filled with anime characters who have great designs. It actually has some very interesting story elements assuming you take the time to switch Chrono Ark’s language from Korean to English. The story beats players unlock after a run are pretty interesting and help keep them invested in coming back, but unfortunately, I haven’t seen all of the story yet. The protagonist Lucy seems to be stuck in a time loop, seeking out a clock tower to reset the world. Since I don’t know what information is most spoiler-worthy yet, I think it’s just best to state that there is an interesting and very anime-like story present in the title that you can skip if that’s not your speed.

The actual gameplay of Chrono Ark is quite simple: you move your protagonist, Lucy, around a map and interact with objects that can give you rewards or send you into battles. Once in battle, you simply select which actions you’d like to take from the skill cards that get drawn from your deck. The actual battle mechanics and deck building of Chrono Ark is extremely involved, as you’ll have a number of things to keep track of while trying to maintain the health of your heroes. At the start of each run, you’ll choose from two unlocked characters, and you can add up to two more as you progress.

Your heroes fit into specific roles, such as DPS, tank, and support, and each of them has their own skills that make up the unified deck you use during combat. Each turn is more fluid than you’d expect from most turn-based games, as you draw a specific number of cards each turn and generate mana you can use to spend those cards, but enemies can attack you after enough actions have been taken. If you have an enemy with a “3” below them, that means you can use three cards before that enemy gets to attack. This means enemy attacks can happen in the middle of your turn to punish you for taking too many actions rather than in set “player phase/enemy phase” demarcations that are used in most other turn-based titles.

Ending your turn also increases the turn count by one as if you performed another action, but ending your turn is often a necessity. Since skill cards are character specific, that means only the specific character who added them to the deck can use them (outside of some corner cases, there are characters who make cards for others to use), and each time someone uses a skill, they get a level of exhaustion. Exhaustion increases the mana costs of skills further used in that turn, so if something originally costs one mana, it’ll cost two if they already used another skill before it. Eventually, even if you use spam skills that cost zero mana, you’ll slowly still run out of mana due to this mechanic.

This mechanic is actually genius when it comes to balancing, at least in the early game. The restrictions of mana and exhaustion do wonders to constrain players and really makes you think about what your next move needs to be- especially if the boss is going to attack after your next action. However, because action economy is everything in these kinds of games, you can find ways to reduce the mana costs of skills you draw, as well as powerful swift skills that don’t increase turn count, which in turn means monsters don’t get closer to their next attack. Careful building of your deck can give you the opportunity to take the largest possible number of actions per turn, but only strategic planning of your turns will end in actually achieving that result.

With heroes being split into categories like DPS and tank you might want to just blitz through with high damage cards, but I’ve had more success doing things to taunt enemies using my tank while also blocking or reducing incoming damage to one in conjunction with skipping my turn to waste a boss’s attack. There’s a ton of strategies you can use when planning out your turns, and different heroes may have abilities that synergize better together than others. But as with most other roguelikes, that’s something you need to learn as you progress.

For customization, each hero has a wide variety of skills they can use, and you’ll earn more as you find items while exploring or when leveling up your heroes. Some skills have more text than a Yu-Gi-Oh card, and there are a number of different mechanics that you can use to eliminate any monsters who stand in your way. Some characters can burn, bleed, or inflict pain on your enemies so they take damage each of their turns, some can buff your party and debuff enemies, and some make zero cost attack skills that get added to your hand for you to use on enemies that turn. There’s a lot of possible combinations for you to use since there are a large number of playable characters, and there’s lots of equipment and relics you can find.

Every character has two equipment slots they can use to get various bonuses, though the equipment is found randomly on your journey. Relics are also randomly discovered while you’re in a run, and you can place them in a relic case to gain up to four passive buffs of wildly varying benefit. Some relics will simply give you additional crit damage or health, while others may give you the effects of other relics at random every battle. Some even inflict you with a curse but give very powerful equipment if you kill a boss with the relic active. So, on top of forming a team composition and deck comprised of attacks from up to four characters, you also have equipment, relics, and a large number of consumable items to heal, stun enemies, or remove debuffs.

One thing that sets Chrono Ark apart from other roguelike deck builders is how it uses the health of your heroes. Heroes at full health will have a completely red bar, and taking damage reduces their current health but leaves the reduced health as green meter that can be easily healed up by your skills. Taking another hit removes the green meter and further reduces red health, but health recovery is significantly reduced if you’ve lost the green recoverable health. Not to mention, green health is fully recovered after battle, so you have to weigh finishing a battle quickly versus keeping your characters topped off because reduced health carries over between battles.

If you’ve played Darkest Dungeon, Chrono Ark has a similar near-death mechanic called Death’s Door where a character can’t be killed so long as they have some amount of red health in their meter. When a character gets one shotted and falls to -4 HP, for example, if you can heal them before they next take another hit then they can survive but taking any damage while in the Death’s Door state will faint that character (usually, there’s also a stat to prevent fainting, I discovered). Some bosses can do incredibly powerful attacks that might put two or three of your heroes into Death’s Door almost immediately at the start of the fight and properly healing your party and taunting with your tank is paramount to actually surmount the challenge.

Chrono Ark very pleasantly surprised me, and it runs great on my Steam Deck. The character artwork is gorgeous, the music is riddled with heavy tones, and the gameplay mechanics are so involved and interesting that I can’t wait to be done with work for the day just to try and finish up another run. In terms of difficulty, Chrono Ark isn’t too terribly challenging- but you will want to pay attention to what the boss mechanics are while you fight. Some bosses may force you to inflict a status ailment on your own party, and if you forget it’ll inflict it on all of your party members automatically. These are MMO-style bosses where you need to pay attention to boss mechanics in order to survive, and it makes overcoming the challenge all the more exciting when you get past the golden lady with her glowing crosses.

All in all, I’ve enjoyed Chrono Ark and look forward to playing it even more. The only weird issue is that it’s a pain to play with just a controller, as the controller’s cursor would get stuck or was shifting all the way to the bottom of the screen at annoying times, so I’d actually recommend playing this with a mouse and keyboard instead. You can control almost everything with just your mouse and the ctrl key on your keyboard, though you can move with WASD if you prefer, but the mouse controls actually work pretty well on Steam Deck in comparison to just using a controller, since I could touch the screen to highlight anything I wanted, to move the player character, or drag and drop items to forge new items that are somehow worse than the items I put in.

That being said, I think we can safely bring this entry of Save State to a close. Remember to save your documents often and always back up on a regular schedule. That’s not a weak attempt at a joke this week: Learn from my example. See you in two weeks!