What If Slay the Spire Was Anime? - Phantom Rose Scarlet Review
When Slay the Spire arrived in early access form in 2017, it was a revelation of sorts—at least, it was a revelation for gamers like myself, who adore both roguelikes and deck-building card games. Here was an intense, challenging, polished experience that combined the best elements of both of those genres into an utterly addictive new style.
Fast-forward almost five years, and that mix of roguelike and deck-builder that Slay the Spire innovated has become a formula unto itself, copied and imitated by dozens upon dozens of games. Initially released in 2019, Phantom Rose Scarlet is one of those dozens, but this one brings its own special twist. It blends the nail-biting, strategic gameplay that makes this genre so compelling with a beautiful anime coat of paint. That small addition proves to be a defining one for the overall experience.
[Editor’s note: Last week we held a contest where TapTap users could submit their choices for hidden gems they recommended to other users and TapTap editors. We had so many great recommendations that we couldn’t wait to check some of them out for ourselves. Phantom Rose Scarlet was recommended by TapTap user @qui. Thank you to qui for the suggestion, and look forward to more TapTap Explorer opportunities in the future!]
Phantom Rose Scarlet casts players into the role of Reina, a maid who also happens to have knowledge of deadly combat abilities. The mansion that Reina is meant to take care of has been mysteriously overtaken by strange creatures and brutal enemies who want her dead, and the other maids have gone into hiding or been kidnapped. Reina must search through the mansion, rescue her colleagues, and try to find the source for all this chaos.
At least I...think that’s the plot? Phantom Rose Scarlet’s story is told almost exclusively through dialogue-light, animation-light illustrations, along with some very ominous and obscure notes that you can discover on your runs. After several successful runs through the game (and one or two failures), I still hadn’t managed to piece together much of what was actually going on. But that wasn’t a major concern, as the story elements surrounding the game seem more about vibes anyway. And those vibes? They are excellent.
Phantom Rose Scarlet’s ace in the hole is its absolutely stunning art. The game is a one-person creation of the artist known as Makaroll, and their slickly designed, cute-yet-dark aesthetic helps the game shine. This is a game where virtually every character you come across, including the protagonist and the final bosses, are adorable anime girls. And yet the cutscenes, environments, and battles still manage to evoke a sense of dread, an itching certainty that something has gone horribly wrong in this place.
Of course all these fantastic visuals would be wasted if Phantom Rose Scarlet couldn’t back them up with excellent gameplay. Thankfully, that’s not a concern here. The game uses a slightly simplified take on the dungeon exploring established in titles like Slay the Spire. Generally, you’re only ever given one or two choices for the next room to visit. Those rooms can contain battles, a shop, hidden items (i.e. usually a new card or two to add to your deck), or special events that can have multiple outcomes.
The battles are the biggest focus, of course, and the game’s unique take on card combat is up to the task. You begin each run through the mansion with a deck consisting of between fifteen and twenty cards. As you progress, you’ll find new cards to add to your deck, dissolve excess cards that you don’t need, and even spend some rubies to upgrade your favorites. Unlike most card games, though, you don’t draw cards during combat encounters. Rather, your whole deck is available at your fingertips at any time, with cards helpfully split into two stacks—one for attack cards and one for magic cards.
This massive mechanical change may read as heresy to some dedicated card game fans. After all, if you can choose from your whole deck at any time, the core card game element of RNG (“random number generator” or randomness, essentially) is gone. It’s a valid concern, but Phantom Rose Scarlet replaces the usual anxiety surrounding card draws with another layer of strategy. See, just because you have access to every card in your deck doesn’t mean that all of them are available to use at all times.
Each card in the game comes with a level; the more powerful the card, the higher the level. One of Phantom Rose Scarlet’s most basic attack cards, for example, is Blade. It attacks the enemy for three damage and raises the power of this card’s attack by one for any subsequent uses, and it’s considered level 2. Compare that to Pierce, a card that attacks for five damage normally but hits for two times that amount if the enemy has a Barrier (basically a shield on top of their regular hit points). Pierce is a level 5 card.
The level serves not just as shorthand for how complex and potentially powerful a card is, but also as a signifier of how long the cooldown will be before you can use the card again. After you use Blade, you only need to wait two turns to use it again; Pierce requires a much lengthier five-turn wait. And those cooldown times carry over between battles, so if you burn through all your most powerful, high-level cards to smash down one tough opponent and then run right into another, none of those cards will be ready to use as you head into the next fight.
The idea of having access to your full deck of cards but having to build a balanced strategy around cooldowns is compelling enough on its own, but Phantom Rose Scarlet also uses that system to add in further mechanical complexity to the cards themselves. Many of the game’s cards focus on giving yourself buffs or your opponents debuffs, and that can extend to increasing or decreasing cooldowns for cards.
One of my personal favorite cards in the game was Star Shield, a magic card that gives a whopping eight barrier but also reduces the cooldown cost of all cards currently on cooldown if it’s played during the first phase of battle. It was a great way to work through that aforementioned scenario of starting a battle with all my big cards on cooldown.
Anecdotes like that just barely scratch the surface of what’s possible in Phantom Rose Scarlet, though. In the half-dozen or so runs I have played so far, I’ve only unlocked around half of the total cards available in the game. There are multiple difficulty settings, a range of toggleable upgrades that can be purchased between runs, and frankly just a ton of content and reasons to keep playing, even when a run goes horribly wrong.
Whatever the differences in style and structure, in the end, that’s the key thing that Phantom Rose Scarlet shares with Slay the Spire and every other good take on this style of deck-builder roguelike: They drive players to keep on grinding through the dungeon, to keep on searching for that perfect run. Phantom Rose Scarlet is an easier game overall, but it’s still got plenty of depth, and that grim-yet-colorful anime style kept me engaged throughout. I’m definitely going to be returning to this one over and over in the future.
SCORE: 4 STARS OUT OF 5
PLAY IF YOU LIKE:
• Slay the Spire. If you can't get enough of the deck-building, dungeon-crawling of this modern classic, you'll likely find a lot to appreciate about Phantom Rose Scarlet as well.
• Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid. Maids are, let's say, a very common role in anime, but nobody's handled that trope in a more entertaining way than this goofy manga series. Phantom Rose Scarlet has a distinctly darker tone, but it's also full of cute maids.
💬 Have you played Phantom Rose Scarlet? Let me know what you think of it in the comments below! If you haven't played it, let me know what your favorite deck-builder/roguelike game is!
CHECK OUT SOME OTHER RECENT REVIEWS FROM TAPTAP:
Is It a Movie? Is it a Game? Is It a Podcast? Well, It Certainly Is Unique – Blind Drive Review | TapTap
https://www.taptap.io/post/1615032
Is This the Best-Looking Mystery Ever? - Evan’s Remains Review | TapTap
https://www.taptap.io/post/1617068
When Ghost Hunting is So Boring, You'd Rather Not Hunt Ghosts - Hank'n Spank Review | TapTap
https://www.taptap.io/post/1607467
Mentioned games
