Tamarak Trail Review

What does one do with a game that is a solid example of its genre but sits in a category that is littered with at least 10 titans released in the last 5 years?

It has been a busy half decade for roguelites with deckbuilding in them. Hell, it has been a busy two months for the subgenre, with the internet aflame with praise for a certain poker-based title. Tamarak Trail arrived at about the same time and had its own spin on the deckbuilding by using dice instead of cards to customise.

Let’s get on with the premise first – the player takes on the role of a member of the Sturgeon Lodge. There is evil along a route called the Tamarak Trail which must be cleansed if there is ever going to be peace.

With the starting class of Detective – the player has two six-sided dice with a mixture of defense faces, attack faces, and two special ones.  One causes bleed effect and the other allows the class to dodge all damage for one turn. I’ll go into more detail about these later.

The main game involves travelling along randomly generated paths while getting into fights and finding new abilities to customise the dice along the way to face the game’s big bosses.

The character has two things to worry about – a stamina/health meter and hearts. Stamina/health is for activating dice sides, when it is reduced to zero and the character takes damage they lose hearts, lose all hearts and the run is over. Stamina has lots of opportunities to replenish (and full refills after every fight) while hearts must be replenished through special events, or from tents that litter the trail.

The turn-based combat itself is very well done. At the beginning of each turn it is clearly displayed what each monster will do – attack, cast a buff/debuff, or place temporary armour on themselves. The player can then roll their dice and spend health/stamina to cast whatever face they get. There is also the option to not use the die at all and replenish more stamina/health at the end of their turn. In the beginning I felt like it was too random. Even though each die has physics and the rolls can be manipulated I struggled to figure out good strategies with them. I moved all my defense sides on to one die, and all attack on the other so I could get some reliable events. Soon though the wrinkles emerge. Some abilities work better if the die collide with other die – the draw back is that these end up costing more stamina/health. Then there are faces that will flip over to other sides and allow the player to combo more attack and defenses together. Along the trail there are cores that can be attached to the dice that allow for additional bonuses, like removing debuffs, or adding protective armour each time the dice flips.

After a little experimentation – it is possible to have dice that go on ‘infinite’ loops, they flip over on themselves and repeat abilities. When that happens it triggers a much more powerful attack. The danger to these infinite combos is that when they trigger they exhaust whichever side triggers the combo, and to reuse it costs a lot more stamina.

This hook, discovering what combinations of flipping die are effective, and what good risks are worth taking by colliding two or more dice is how Tamarak Trail triggers the roguelite dopamine drip. There is a real hit to the system when you take out 3 enemies with a well curated set of triggers, or turning a boss powerless by infinite comboing hundreds of turns of debuff on them.

This, to me, is a core feature in roguelites – breaking the game to the point of delight. It can happen very early on in Tamarak Trail (before the first boss) and games like these need to anticipate this and think of counterbalances. Slay The Spire does it by making horrible mean-spirited final bosses, Monster Train keeps their playthroughs short and offers a difficult modulator. Tamarak Trail anticipates things like infinites by dragging down the pace of the whole second half of the game. This is done by monster being able to deal direct damage to the player’s hearts if the player doesn’t show restraint.

If I am putting my designer’s hat on I can nod and agree, this is an interesting spin to the game, with the player having to show caution and be thoughtful about their next step. As a player though, I am less enthusiastic about this sort of thing; I want to run rampant with my setup and delight in the chaos I am causing.

This complaint is made worse because of Tamarak’s unlock system. Beating each boss gives the player 1 or 2 of the meta currency and there are not many other places to collect more of these. The first basic unlock is 5 meta coins and the extra classes are 10 and 15 each. This means that before experimentation with new play styles, or even unlocking a couple of handy crutches can be done, the player is going to have to play a lot of very samey scenarios and ones that will always become plodding in the second half (where the most meta-coins can be unlocked).

The chore of grinding for extra classes was not appealing to me after I beat the final boss, and I dabbled with Magician class purely for research purposes. She was fascinating due to all her attacks being based around elemental effects – but the risk of accidentally killing an enemy (and killing my character) meant that I quickly went back to the detective.

There is stuff in Tamarak Trail that is very promising, just none of it is fully fleshed out. Any seasoned player will find themselves inclined to move over to another game, and newcomers would do better to start elsewhere.

Conclusion

Tamarak Trail’s crime is not that it is bad, just that it is not on the same level as other roguelites in its genre, or even its very crowded subgenre.