Spires End Review

Spires End from Favro Ventures is an epic and thematic choose your own adventure game. You are controlling a group of heroes attempting to scale the spire and learn the mystery of where all of the townsfolk have disappeared to. I'm going to avoid spoilers so that's about as far as I'm willing to go on the story.

You as the player will control 2 of the 7 heroes at all times. Turns consist of reading what's on the card and then doing what it says. This can consist of advancing to a new card, picking up items and opening doors, or combat. This is the real meat and potatoes of the game. Combat itself is easy. Players have a certain amount of hit points and armor points. Each of their skills cost a certain amount of hit points so you need to weigh the pros and cons of each attack. The more powerful it is, the more it'll cost. Then you'll roll your D8 and deal the damage to the enemy. Next you have the option to roll again to regain some hit points or cleanse to remove a status effect. The other hero repeats and then the enemy goes. They function mostly the same. You roll their D8 and that determines who will be attacked. Then flip over a card to find out which attack they'll do. Roll for damage. Then roll for healing. Rinse and repeat until someone dies.

If one of your heroes die in combat, you'll swap them out for another from the deck. Dying isn't necessarily a bad thing though. When a character dies, they'll grant a buff for the next couple of rounds of combat. If you can stay alive to the ending, you'll win the game but if all of the characters die, you will lose.

The Good: Spires End is full of tough decisions. Between choosing which card to go to next all the way to deciding which attack to use there's always a consequence. There's nothing more deflating than using your strongest attack to have it miss and waste valuable hit points but when it lands it's a great feeling. I have to mention the artwork for the game as well. The black, white, red scheme is perfect. That's always been a favorite color scheme of mine but this takes it to another level.

The Okay: When you lose, you'll need to reset the deck. This isn't necessarily a chore to do because it's clearly numbered but it's certainly a minor inconvenience to have to put them back in order every time you play the game.

The Not So Good: There's a lot of status effects and a tracker to make sense of them but I didn't fully get it even after a few plays. I think that it makes sense on paper but in practice it feels a little clunky to keep track of. Using cubes on a separate card meant that I'd have another thing to pay attention to.

Final Thoughts: I play a fair amount of solo games at this point. Spires End is a great solo game. It checks off so many boxes for a game like this; interesting choices, engaging story, artwork, and phenomenal gameplay. There's some luck involved with dice rolls but it never feels unfair. Especially with essentially 7 lives to play with. This is a game that I need to discover all of the endings for. I couldn't recommend Spires End enough. It's a choose your own adventure where every choice matters.