Oh, look at this, something new looking in the deckbuilding roguelike/lite space…and with a demo just out! Greetings to Moonsigil Atlas, expected release later this year.

I got early access to the demo and, while rather short, it has me excited to see what the full release is like. Read on for a few quick thoughts or just cut out the middle man (hi) and play the demo on Steam.

So the new element here is that you don’t have energy or mana to play your cards, but physical space (in a moon and sometimes extra little moons). This means you want to plan out card areas, cards that have effects that stick around taking up space, or depend on where you play them (playing so sigils or markings on them are in certain regions to block an attack, for example).

The presentation and production values are good: smooth animations, nice use of colors, and overall good feel for interactions. Clicking/hovering/selecting cards was a bit different than I’m used to, though probably because rather than just dragging and dropping, like card, you will want to rotate and carefully consider where you place something. There is a way to place a card to see how it goes down without committing, though that doesn’t block you from trying cards on top of each other (which won’t work when you actually play them).

Works great on the Steam Deck, though the default settings had rather high power draw (about 2 hours battery life). Lowering to something like 60 or 45 fps gives you much better life. There wasn’t any controller support when I played, just basic trackpads as mouse. That was fine, but controller support would help avoid any misplacement or confusion on how to navigate.

The demo was a bit short for my tastes, but better to leave them wanting more right? It took me about 30-40 minutes the first time to learn and beat the only boss, a bit quicker after that. There are 2 characters with one locked to start and a bunch of cards.

Just when you start to see the different strategies, like adding more effects to a card or changing the area it occupies, the demo ends. So you don’t get a sense of those very important elements like what you can really build around, meta (and regular) progression, difficulty, and so on. Still, definitely worth a shot for an hour or two!

See the game page on Steam or go right to the demo. The full game doesn’t have a release date yet, beyond just “2025.”