Tamarak Trail

by Aethyna Mar 12, 2024 | 1 Votes | 48 Played | 0 Reviews

8 rate

Genres:

Strategy

Graphics:

Labels:

Deck Building , Dice games , Fantasy Setting

Platforms:

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Versus Evil , tinyBuild Tamarak Trail is a unique "dice-building" roguelike as you make your way across the map to the crash site of a mysterious glowing meteor that had mutated various fauna, turning them aggressive and hostile, and had risen the dead. What will you find at the end of the trail? Play Now Similar Games

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Summary Plotline Gameplay Graphics/ Sound Conclusion

Summary

Tamarak Trail is a unique dice-based “deckbuilding” roguelike where you get to build your dice that you’ll bring into battle, chaining up flips and bounces, as you make your way across the map to the crash site of a mysterious glowing meteor that had mutated various fauna, turning them aggressive and hostile, and had risen the dead. Upgrade your lodge after every run to improve your chances for the next run and unlock new character classes to play with.

Plotline

A mysterious glowing meteor streaked through the sky. Bits and pieces of it rained down onto the local fauna below, mutating them into aggressive and horrendous beings. It also raised the dead from their graves and eventually crashed deep into a mountain where an abandoned mine reside, emitting its malevolent influence across the planet.

A letter arrived at the Sturgeon Lodge, likely asking for help to track down the meteor and to “take care” of it, but unfortunately, the lodge has been in disrepair for ages and it’s now up to you to not only take on the task but also to collect Garmonbozia to help restore the lodge.

Gameplay

Before you start on your journey, you’ll need to set up your game by choosing which character you’ll want to play as at the “hub” in the game, the lodge. The game features three different characters to choose from, namely the Detective, the Magician, and the Tracker, but the last two are locked. You’ll need to collect enough Garmonbozia to unlock them. You can only get Garmonbozia by defeating bosses in this game.

At the lodge, you’ll also get to build and restore a variety of facilities, including adding a botany lab or rebuilding the fountain, all of which require Garmonbozia. Naturally, unlocking any of these will greatly help you in your subsequent runs, making it that much more possible to reach the end of your journey. Once you’re ready, you can dive right into a run.

The gameplay here may seem just like any typical roguelike, since you get to choose which path to take to reach each “stage boss” before reaching the final boss at the very end. Though interestingly, you get to see the entire journey you need to take right from the start. The journey isn’t segmented into “chapters” or anything like that, unlike many roguelikes.

There are plenty of encounters as you make your way across the map. Besides the usual battles, there are also event-based encounters where you’ll need to resolve a random event by making a decision, usually out of several decisions given. The decision you make may have immediate consequences or some effects later down the road. There are also rest areas where you can restore a single health point, and a shop node where you can spend some of that hard-earned coins to buy new dice faces.

Now that we’ve gotten all of that out of the way, let’s take a closer look at Tamarak Trail’s engaging, one-of-a-kind combat system. Although it does share some similarities with deckbuilding games, the fact that you roll dice instead of play cards here made a huge difference. For starters, you have a more restricted way to, so call, build your “deck” or “dice” in this case. After all, each die only has six faces so you can only have up to 6 kinds of actions, ranging from attacks, defenses, and buffs and debuffs. You start with only two dice, but you can get more by defeating stage bosses, along with dice cores, which function to further augment and bolster the effects of all dice faces you’ve placed on the dice. You can even get new and better dice faces as rewards for winning fights.

The fight begins with you rolling the dice. You can do it manually or use the auto-roll option. Once rolled, you’ll then be able to use the action that landed face-up. This also means that, at least at the start, you’ll only get to perform two actions a turn. If you don’t like the actions you get, you can use the limited re-roll option to reroll the dice. There’s even a separate Resolve cost for using these actions, unless the action is one of those rare 0-cost actions.

Resolve works in a very intriguing way in this game. Not only does it function like a kind of “energy” for you to use actions, but it also doubles as some sort of health bar, a buffer to protect your actual lives from your enemies’ attacks. Resolve is restored in a fixed amount every turn, though you can increase or decrease the number depending on various buffs or debuffs. There’s a maximum limit to the bar as well so you can’t keep accumulating Resolve, essentially making yourself invincible.

If your Resolve bar is completely depleted, any attack you suffer will take away a single heart from your character. You’ll start with five hearts, but as mentioned, you can restore your lost hearts at any of the rest areas you may land on. If you lose both Resolve and Hearts, the game is over, and you’ll be brought back to the lodge.

Of course, Resolve isn’t the only thing standing between your Heart and your enemies’ attacks. You can also stack shields, which functions much like shields do in deckbuilding games. They are the first line of defense against any attacks. That said, there are still some attacks that can bypass your shields and the shields only last a turn. Thankfully, the game clearly shows your enemies’ intent, allowing you to plan and strategize accordingly, including setting up shields and making sure you have the Resolve to dampen the damage you’re about to take.

As you’re using dice to do combat in Tamarak Trail, the game has a very unique design, featuring interesting gameplay mechanics that work really well together with the dice you roll to provide a lot more depth and strategy to its gameplay. This includes this thing called “bounces,” which tracks how many times your dice hit each other. Some dice faces you get come with special abilities that tap into this bounce system, only activating certain effects if a bounce happens. Even how many times a die bounced can play a major role in bolstering the effects that are triggered.

Another fascinating gameplay design here is its dice-flipping mechanism. Typically triggered by a bounce, there are actions where you can flip the dice when the actions are used. When a die is flipped, the resulting die face you get can be activated as well, allowing you to effectively chain up flips and actions, as long as you’ve got enough Resolve to use the actions you’ve rolled, resulting in an epic Infinite Combo.

Interestingly enough, despite having some unique mechanics, the game’s tutorial can be a bit barebones, mainly because it just covers the basics, at least at first. It’s only when you’ve discovered some new mechanics on your own, such as the Infinite Combo, that the game further elaborates on it, giving you some insights as to why and how it can be triggered. Of course, as with most deckbuilding, or in this case, dice-building games, tooltips are super important, and you’ll do well to carefully read and understand them.

As fun as the game is, however, Tamarak Trail can be a daunting game to get into due to its many one-of-a-kind features, even if you’re already familiar with deckbuilding games in general. Its no-hand-holding approach is good, but more information is definitely appreciated. Sometimes even for the tooltips, some effects aren’t properly explained. For the Magician, for instance, I’m sure players would appreciate a grimoire of some sort where all the different element combos are listed so you know how many there are, but they are “greyed out” until the player discovers them.

Graphics/ Sound

Tamarak Trail features beautiful and meticulously detailed, hand-drawn-style artwork that really showcase the fictional world you’re playing in and adds a whole lot of charm to the game. In terms of sound, the game has a selection of background tunes that really goes well with the game’s mostly dark and dreary atmosphere. Each action you make in the game has a “crunch” to it, too, thanks to the sound effects.

Conclusion

Tamarak Trail provides a bold and unique take on the roguelike genre, offering players a chance to build their own dice as they progress, and it is truly a breath of fresh air. The game can feel complicated to get into, but once you get the basics down and figure out some of the more interesting strategies and combos yourself, you may find that the game provides an in-depth and highly strategic gameplay that is satisfying to master. So, all in all, if you love deckbuilding roguelikes and are looking for something special, Tamarak Trail is your best bet!

New Game Added: Tamarak Trail

by Aethyna Mar 12, 2024

Tamarak Trail is a unique "dice-building" roguelike as you make your way across the map to the crash site of a mysterious glowing meteor that had mutated various fauna, turning them aggressive and hostile, and had risen the dead. What will you find at the end of the trail?