I find it to be quite rare that when a game says it has a graphic novel art style that it actually has one. There’s often just something that reads as slightly off, like it’s not quite cut from the same cloth. I’m happy to say that isn’t the case with Stack Order, a deckbuilding roguelike with a story all about layering your cards just right to maximise their effects that looks like you could find it in a hip and trendy French comic book shop.

Where other deckbuilders may focus on the effects of single cards, Stack Order is about making your cards work in tandem with one another. In your casting zone, you have a handful of fields. Some are devoted to defence cards, some are focused on offence cards, and the last are focused on ability cards. You can always see what your opponent is about to do, so it comes down to figuring out how you want to titularly stack your cards in response to that.

Say, for example, your foe is going to do a boatload of damage to you. You may want to load up one of your defence zones with cards that nets you armour for that round. The trade-off in playing that stack is that you can only play all the cards you’ve loaded up into it, and if it’s a defence stack, that means you won’t be doing any damage. This would be the same inversely with an offensive stack, meaning you want to make sure you’re doing a lot of damage so you don’t get got on your opponent’s turn.

You don’t want to just randomly add cards to a pile either. For example, there’s one offence card that does an extra point of damage for every card activated before it in a stack. Get enough cards in that stack, and you can do some serious harm. You can also add a card to a stack without playing said stack that turn, meaning it’s good to plan in advance too. Every last decision feeds into another one, making for a strongly strategic time.

And most importantly, Stack Order is just simply gorgeous. The line art is chunky, the character designs have an Adventure Time whimsy to them, the card art is simple but delectable, and there are these beautiful battle animations that feel reminiscent of the Zelda CD-i games in as positive away as you can interpret that (it should be very positive, in my eyes). I like it a lot! And if you’re interested, and want to try out the demo for yourself (or just wishlist it), you can do so on Steam right here.