It adds a sense of mystery too, as you’re never quite sure what your win or loss might mean to the story. Your success means that allies join you, their own story gets a satisfying ending, or your standing with their faction goes up. It’s as well-written as you’d expect from Klei Entertainment, and each match feels like more is on the line than just basic survival. On the one hand, it feels good to slip into a deck-builder where the story matters. There’s some deviation from run to run – you might choose to take a different path with different missions, while random events do still occur – but the outline and big beats are the same. Sal Ik-Derrick’s story is effectively a bounty hunter one, as you take down a rival hunter, while Rook’s story focuses on corporate espionage, as you help out an old friend who is forming a union against the Storm Baron company.

You will pick one of three characters, and they each have a different story, all in a dusty, ramshackle futuristic setting. What Griftlands does is keep the roguelike formula of ‘get as far as you can, die, and be better prepared for the next run’, but then layers a narrative on top.

You might get choices to make, mostly as a vehicle for the game to chuck you rewards or battles. The tendency in deck-building is to let the story come through the random events, but you don’t often get an overall plot. The big deviation is that Griftlands is story-focused.

Griftlands sale