What do you get if you mix a bullet-hell shooter with a deck-building game like Slay the Spire? You get One Step from Eden, and it is a revelation.
So much is like Slay the Spire. You have only one life to see how far you can get. You choose cards to add after battle. You choose between different paths to follow. There are bosses, mini-bosses, and things to do other than battle (rescue people, visit the shop, etc). You buy, sell, remove, and upgrade cards. You gain experience which goes towards unlocking new cards and characters. You even progress towards something – Eden in this case, not up a spire.
One Step from EdenDeveloper: Thomas Moon KangPublisher: Humble BundlePlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC and Switch
But at the same time it’s incredibly different. In One Step from Eden, . You play on a grid – you on one side, enemies on the other – and you need to move around to line up your abilities while dodging what your opponents throw at you.
Take, for instance, your thunderbolt spell. It’s really powerful and crashes down four spaces in front of you, but if your enemy isn’t there, it won’t hurt them – it will be a wasted attack, and you’ll have to wait for it to shuffle back around to try again.
Abilities are hot-keyed to Q and P and E, and they automatically change after you’ve used them, cycling in other abilities from your deck to use. Once you’ve used them all, they shuffle, or you can force a shuffle by pressing spacebar. It sounds confusing and it is – to begin with.
But once you learn what things do, once you begin to look up from your hotbar, that’s when the magic happens. That’s when you begin deliberately doing things and conjuring strategies on the fly, depending on what your enemy is doing and where they are.