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The roguelike is quickly becoming one of my favorite genres and I’ve made no secret how much I love tabletop gaming, so it comes at no surprise that I enjoyed playing As We Descend, the debut title of developer Box Dragon. As We Descend is an upcoming roguelike deckbuilding game that incorporates elements from strategy games.
In As We Descend, you play as a senior member of a city, directing your home’s forces to fix failing technology, venture into monster-infested areas to find resources, and mount defenses for approaching threats. Your actions–both navigating the city and fighting in turn-based combat encounters–are dictated by the cards you’ve collected and upgraded in your deck, injecting a sense of curated randomness into each attempt to protect the city. You must find a way to protect the city as it slowly descends into the planet, uncovering secrets to this post-apocalyptic world. Each failed run sees you start over in the city centuries later, attempting to build upon whatever systems were left behind by the previous civilization embodying the city.
Ahead of the launch of the demo for As We Descend, I got a chance to play the roguelike game and simultaneously interview game director Kevin Chang. As I marveled at the game’s incredible art direction and storytelling hooks and laughed with malicious glee at combining the right order of cards to demolish the dangerous-looking demonic forces attempting to breach the city’s walls, our conversation touched on Chang’s background in tabletop gaming design, how As We Descend captures the exciting opening hours of a Civilization game, and how the narrative elements of the game almost didn’t happen.
Did you come into this project wanting to make a tabletop-inspired game and then you adopted roguelike elements, or was the plan to make a roguelike and the systems of a tabletop game snuck in later?
Chang: It’s always going to be a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation but I do feel like I did approach wanting this to just be a really good roguelike game. Actually, you won’t believe where it started–it was a 4X roguelike deckbuilder. So it was very siege-like–non-violent–and I tried so many wild ideas. I even have an old build of the game. I’ll show you sometime. It’s in a little command prompt and we added mouse-and-keyboard support to it, and there’s a little hex grid that you get to just play on. It’s the funniest thing. It looks like Dwarf Fortress.
…It did just keep moving closer to tabletop unintentionally. Early on we were like, ‘Okay, it’s going to make it super strategic, going to make it really replayable,’ and then people kept wanting more conflict, more hype, more [excitement]. I think a big part of that was of course we found our art director, [Aleks Nikonov]. He used to work at Riot Games as a senior concept artist for both their sort of environmental design and also their characters once we hired him. So [tech director] Karl [Bergström] and I co-founded the studio together. We used to work at Stunlock Studios. This was back in 2020.
We found Aleks, I want to say in the summer of 2020, and when we hired him, we went, ‘Wow, we can actually make sure the game looks amazing now,’ because, between Karl and myself, we can make a very fun game. I’m a game designer and Karl’s a programmer. We can land a good game, but can we make it look amazing? No. [But now] we’ve got Alex, and we’re like, ‘Okay, we can make it look amazing.’ So we leaned more into it–I would say that is probably the biggest impetus for change. I don’t think it was even a tabletop or roguelike thing. It was more like, ‘What is the potential of the studio and sort of the team potential?’ and we wanted to just lean into it more.
So to focus a bit more on that change in direction, why opt for the cyclical nature of a roguelike to tell a story? Neither tabletop campaigns nor strategy games tend to lean into cyclical stories, even if mechanically they can be sometimes.
The problem [in strategy games like Civilization] is the sort of late game–in Civ I might pass turn 200, 300, maybe even 400 depending on the run. You just have so many units, so many cities, and the decisions you make aren’t that impactful anymore. You have to move a bunch of troops. There’s so much logistics to do–which [does match] the feeling of controlling this massive unwieldy empire, but it’s also a chore. [You spend] a lot of time doing very little, and that’s the part we want you to fix [with As We Descend]. We’re like, ‘Okay, can we capture the magic of that first 45 minutes of [Berlin] game where you’re making good decisions, you’re choosing from a random tech tree where you are finding the best places to settle?’
…As We Descend is all about making choices and pivoting the whole time. We don’t want that feeling to go away. So that’s been there from the start. And I think the thing that has been more fleshed out over time [is] this idea about what the unlockables are in the game… I think nowadays people expect unlockables in roguelikes.
I’m a fan of both difficulty and, what I would call, side-grades or horizontal unlocks–anything that gives you more content to play with or more ways to enjoy the game. It’s more sandbox-y, so it’s not Rogue Legacy or something like that where the game gets easier for you the more you play. You get more ways to interface with [the game] as you play more. You get to customize it more, but the game doesn’t necessarily get easier for you. In fact, if anything, maybe it gets harder actually as you learn more, you unlock more and [there are] more choices and more interesting decisions too.
The narrative elements of As We Descend are probably my favorite part of the game–I like how they inform and characterize the city. And the skill checks for talking with people warms my little TTRPG-loving heart.
We’ve only had strong, narrative-driven characters for the past seven months I want to say, maybe eight months.
Wait, what?
Yeah. Before that, it was a very, very impersonal city. I kept arguing with other people, being like, ‘Hey, we have to include this. We have to put the lore text in. We have to make these characters good. We have to make you care about the characters here.’ I kept impressing upon them the sort of urgency I felt of that mission because, without that intimacy of just caring about the city, [As We Descend] does become just yet another strategy game where you don’t give a f***–the troops die and it’s whatever, and there are no stakes there, but sure, let’s pretend there are stakes, [and if] you lose the city and you die off, it’s whatever. That’s not the same as something like a Frostpunk or a Hades where you know the characters, you care about their stories and their journeys and that adds a lot more meaning to the game.
How do these fleshed-out characters inform the characterization of the protagonist? How far can a player stress the protagonist’s morals in defense of the city?
I want [choices] to matter but not in a morality system way, which I think is a bit shallow… I think a good character to talk about is actually Geralt from The Witcher because he always makes Geralt-like decisions no matter what–the game only offers you Geralt-like decisions for all the pathways. They’ll never give you a choice where he does something out of character. So I think it’s going to actually be similar here where your character will never act completely out of character, but you will be able to choose within the framework you’re given.
There are quite a few origin stories for your character. You come from one of the three great houses that inhabit the city, and you can choose what your origin is, what ally you start with, and there might be some additional sub-choices within that. But the goal is [to make you] always this person who is thrust into this position of power, being a warden of the wall. You are not actually the dictator that’s at the top or the authoritarian [voice]. I think that’s such an overdone thing in strategy games, but I also think it misses the topic a little. It doesn’t let us introspect into this idea about being at the whims of something much greater than yourself–it plays into this fantasy of being like an authoritarian sandbox. You get to just dictate as you please, and I think [As We Descend] is not a game where you get [that fantasy]. There’s so many other things that bind you in this game to your responsibility.
So within that framework, you’ll get to make choices that matter, and I hope that when you play later versions of this game, that it really does feel like whatever you choose, you are giving yourself a character by the choices you make, but I don’t want it to be in a character creation way or a, ‘you get to define these things’ [way]. It is not like we’re doing a dating simulator or anything like that. You’ll reflect who you are through your character’s choices, and I want the story to be able to reflect as much of that as possible.
This interview was edited for both brevity and readability.
