Soulstack Demo

I found this on incrementaldb, this is probably one of my favorite games I’ve seen in awhile. It’s really good!

I haven’t played stacklands, so these kinds of card dragging games are new to me, but I like how it plays. It reminds me of a neat concept I found in the devlog of another game, which is context sensitivity. Everything is just dragging cards so it’s easy to understand new concepts as they’re introduced, like visiting town, crafting, dungeons, etc.

I also surprisingly liked the crafting. I went barbarian so I tried all the bone needle and lash combinations to find something with a high attack speed, it’s fun preparing a stack of like 20 lashes and then marking off all the combinations until you find a good one. It reminds me of those element combiner games, but especially Infinite Craft. I was glad to only see 231 possible recipes because if it was like 1000+ or infinite I think I would’ve lost interest.

I needed a bunch of rope and in the process of farming the woods, I ended up with a ton of trees I didn’t want and they were getting in the way. I’d like some way to prevent so many trees from stacking up, like maybe a way to stack them, delete them, queue them, rush them for less resources, a maximum number of cards from the woods you can have out at once, etc.

The game is pretty hard on my browser, I’m pretty sure that’s just the web though and the desktop version on steam will run fine.

The themes are pretty (i also didn’t know they were there). I ended up liking Stained Glass and Meadow more than the default, especially the card colors of Meadow and the background color of Stained Glass.

I’m confused what the resources did when leveling up my pet and what it turned into. It’s a Spark Baboon?? I fed it mostly rope, flint, bones, and stone I think. I like making bad decisions so I wanted to feed it 20 rope to see what happens, but I changed my mind halfway through

When you zoom out, some words like “Berries” and “Arcanite” get split at awkward spots. They could get a little smaller instead (idk how you’d do that) or maybe spill out a little bit, like negative margins in CSS

All of the text could be a little bigger, it’s hard to read even in fullscreen

When I have like 80 wood I like splitting off 60 to sacrifice. I have to drag off 20 pieces of wood individually first, it’d be easier if there was a way to split stacks. I can drag all but one, but that leaves me with 1 wood and I want to have some leftover.

Making the pet “queue” things by surrounding it with tasks you want done is great. Having it bounce around randomly and do things gives you a surprising amount of control by spatially organizing cards on the board. If you don’t want it to activate a card, just take it away. It’s kind of funny looking away for a second and then returning to see it spawned some monsters and started fighting them, the pet is literally getting into trouble which is very monkey-like

It’s a little confusing that you’re taught about breaking down unwanted weapons but can’t break down the dead-ends, especially for the arcanite weapons. The bonus XP is nice though.

If you use all of a resource (like the XP things), it’d be nice if the next one you get is put back in the same spot. I keep a stack of the XP cards next to the level up card but after using them they usually show up somewhere else. You can do this by just clicking and dragging all but one, but it’d be nice

I think cards that are occupied could stand out more, especially when zoomed out

A way to filter or sort weapons would be useful, like searching “bone needle” for the tier 2 bone needle combos, or sorting discovered recipes by attack speed.

The way entering a village works with its own dedicated board is fantastic. I didn’t even know you could move the interior village card itself until I needed some space and realized you could move it and the NPCs

I think I exhausted most of the available content, but I was still having fun with it and wanted to keep playing.

Also, idk how I feel about the quest timers. The dungeon and traveller timers were fine though.

While it wasn’t really an issue while I was playing, I’d like if middle click only panned and didn’t move cards

Offering a huge stack of items is like the best thing ever

This is what my board looked like near the end if you’re curious:

This game is really good, even if you weren’t aiming for the incremental crowd lol. I’m looking forward to any future updates

Just completed the game. GREAT demo! I am a big fan of Stacklands and this felt way more RPG/Adventury compared to Stacklands. Stacklands felt more sim-y with all the resource maintenance and the constant need to have food to feed your villagers. This was way more relaxed. Loved the experimentation with crafting! Would love to see that more developed and go even deeper. Maybe add socketing or enchants as well. Or give the "failed" crafts more of a function other than take apart.

Awesome job!