The narrated app is what sells this one, honestly, more than the combat does. There’s real voice acting reading out the encounter text while you’re deciding what to do, and it does something for the atmosphere that I didn’t expect a companion app to be capable of, I went in fully prepared to resent having a screen at the table and came out converted.

Combat itself, I’ll be straight with people, is not as deep as Gloomhaven, and I say that having played a lot of Gloomhaven. It’s a battleflow system, cards and dice both feeding into hit and damage, and it’s a genuinely fun puzzle for the first several chapters but it doesn’t grow the way I want a campaign system to grow across twenty-plus hours. The bosses are the real spectacle instead, each one taking damage in different tracked body parts with attacks that change as they get hurt, and unboxing a new one is a legitimately great table moment every time.

I need to be honest about the setup and teardown too. This is a heavy box, physically and logistically, sorting minis and tracking sheets and dice back into place after a session eats real time, and it’s part of why this doesn’t come out on a random Tuesday, it needs a whole evening blocked off in advance. Two players works fine for this one though, better than fine, the two-character mode keeps the pacing tight in a way four players sometimes doesn’t.

The thing I keep coming back to is how it stacks up against the older campaign crawlers on my shelf, and it doesn’t quite unseat Gloomhaven for me mechanically, but the storytelling and the sheer object of the thing, the boxes you crack open as you go, the grotesque sculpts, gets it played anyway. Six chapters in with my group and nobody’s bored yet, which given how these campaigns tend to lose people by the midpoint, is its own kind of endorsement.