I was genuinely surprised by how difficult Decktamer is right from the beginning, which is becoming pretty rare in games released in 2026.

To the point where I’m honestly not sure whether this level of difficulty is a good decision from the developers.

Deckbuilders in the style of Slay the Spire are already a fairly niche genre. Adding a Pokémon-like taming system on top of that sounds great on paper, but Decktamer makes it surprisingly counterintuitive: the correct strategy is often not to capture everything you see, but to conserve your taming resources and wait for stronger creatures later in the run.

That is interesting once you understand it, but it also adds another layer of punishment to a game that was already not particularly accessible to the average player.

The result is a game that can feel stupidly difficult at first, even for a player of my caliber. It took me five attempts to beat my first proper run on Standard difficulty, despite being used to competitive games and difficult systems.

I finally completed it after around 2.8 hours from installation, and the achievement I received afterwards was pretty revealing: only around 28% of players had completed a run on Standard difficulty or above.

That says quite a lot.

You already have a niche game in a niche genre, and then only around a third of the people playing it are even completing a Standard run. At some point, difficulty stops being purely a challenge and starts becoming a barrier. I can absolutely see a lot of players trying a few runs, getting destroyed without really understanding what they are doing wrong, and simply moving on.

Once you understand the game better, it becomes much more manageable. Learning when to tame, when to save resources and when to replace your early creatures makes an enormous difference. But I’m not convinced the game communicates those rules particularly well.

Visually and conceptually, I’m also a little mixed.

There is clearly effort here, but the creature designs sometimes become so chaotic that they almost feel like parody. After a while it starts looking like someone threw a platypus, an elephant, a parrot and a lizard into a blender and said:

“Perfect. Give it poison damage.”

The combinations can be charming, but they can also become visually messy and make the world feel less coherent than it probably should.

The game does have some genuinely good ideas, though.

I particularly like the syringe system, where abilities can be transferred between creatures. That opens up a lot of possibilities and allows you to create some ridiculously powerful monsters if you understand the system properly.

The synergies are also better than I initially expected. There is real potential for interesting combinations, and once you start building around specific interactions rather than simply picking the strongest individual creature, the combat becomes much more satisfying.

That is probably where Decktamer is at its best: experimenting, adapting your team and slowly discovering combinations that completely change the strength of your run.

Unfortunately, I still enjoyed it significantly less than some of the better games in this genre.

The overall experience feels a little too messy, the onboarding is harsher than it needs to be, the creature design lacks consistency and the difficulty curve is questionable for a game that already targets a relatively small audience.

I got Decktamer through Humble Bundle, so from that perspective I’m perfectly happy with what I got.

Would I recommend it? Yes, with reservations.

There are good ideas here, and the taming + skill-transfer systems give it an identity of its own. But at full price, I personally would have expected something more polished, more readable and ultimately more enjoyable.

It’s not bad.

It’s just not great either.

Frenchcops
YouTube / Content Creator
Professional Game Tester & Top-World Player

I love the concept and how there's limitless possibilities that you can do for very fun decks. At Pioneer difficulty, every fight can feel like an uphill battle but usually you can power through it with strategic trading of your lower-quality monsters. It feels very rewarding to pull off! The problem I have with this game are the boss fights. More specifically, the game straight up lies to you at times. In the top left corner of the screen you can see a preview of incoming enemy cards that go in to play whenever there's an empty spot on the board. This is very critical for planning out your moves when any one mistake can result in a lost run. I have done roughly half of the bosses available at this current time without any sort of guide or spoilers on the highest difficulty accessible and so far two of them have lied about the boss having multiple phases. One of these bosses was like three or four different phases even. This is just a middle finger to the player on their first run of each boss fight. Not saying it's impossible to overcome it - after all, you can come up with some really busted creatures, but I really despise "knowledge check" mechanics. I didn't get outplayed; the game simply did not tell me the boss was going to evolve into an even stronger form after I went all-in to close out the fight. Bear in mind, these runs typically take one to two hours. So, yeah, I am salty the game just disrespected my time like that and I'm hoping this feedback reaches someone.

It is worth noting that lower difficulties do have access to an Undo feature. However, I do not think this excuses this sort of game design in any way. First of all, in this scenario you'd have to be on the lowest difficulty for the maximum undos to be able to undo all the way back to the start to play differently - that is STILL a giant waste of time and the casuals playing that difficulty won't even bother rewinding. Two, it only serves as an artificial increase to difficulty on the first run. I can easily run through it again building a deck to counter said boss and now that I know it has multiple phases, play accordingly. But why waste my time to begin with? Just put some tooltip or preview indicating that more enemies will spawn just like how literally the entire rest of the game functions. Changing the rules on the very last fight of a run is cheap and has changed my opinion of the game forever. Once was annoying. Twice is where I detect a pattern of a very avoidable problem.

Another smaller gripe I have is the Golden Beetle event. What this does is allow you to evolve your starter card into what is often a run-defining creature. Two issues with this - one, for some reason you have to syringe the native abilities and passives off the starter before evolving them or they just vanish. Which... is pretty stupid considering you'd think an evolution would be a strict upgrade and they tend to really synergize with the predecessor's abilities. Again, the game doesn't tell you this. Second, the Golden Beetle event isn't even guaranteed to show up. Yeah. You can build around your starter only for the game to just go "haha, you don't get to evolve this run." There's also a silver beetle event that is just a strictly worse version of this that relies on you having to manually evolve the starter every battle with a weak 1/1 creature that has to be played which, guess what? That's right - you can't carry over your abilities this way! Even that isn't guaranteed! You might go, well yeah, it's a roguelike - which I MIGHT forgive if... wait for it... the game told you ahead of time with, I don't know, a map feature that gives you a preview of what's to come like all these other games have. If I know for a fact the golden beetle won't spawn, I can still get great value out of my starter and sac it to trade for a better monster after it has served it's purpose. But I don't. Instead I have to protect my little fella in the hopes of maaaaybe evolving it into a game-winning creature and if it doesn't show by battle six just chuck it into the jaws of the late-game hellspawn of nightmares. It's another one of those features that just feels bad. Tell me ahead of time if I'm getting the option for a beetle or not. Or, better yet, just make it always an option if the starter is alive past battle five. It's more fun and it rewards the player for playing well up to that point.

TL;DR : Fun concept with some questionable game design decisions involving obscuring information from the player that can lead to some frustrating yet easily avoidable scenarios.

Deckbuilders and monster collecting rpg's might be my favorite types of games, so yeah, I'm a big fan of this one.
And good on the devs, a year later and they're still rolling out updates and improvements. Love to see it