Culdcept BEGINS - Nintendo Switch 2 Edition Review (Switch 2)

Culdcept has been around since the days of the Sega Saturn, but the odds are pretty good that you’ve never heard of it, let alone played it. Not all of the handful of titles released have left Japan’s shores, and of those that did, sales were low and reviews mixed. It’s the kind of game that either really clicks with you or feels too confusing or arcane to understand and stick with.

After the last release, Culdcept Revolt, came out a decade ago on the 3DS, the franchise is now being dusted off and soft-rebooted with Culdcept Begins. Offering a somewhat simplified and newcomer-friendly take on the notoriously complicated board game, it does a fantastic job of showcasing why this unique series deserves a lot more love and attention. It’s fun, addictive, and strange all at the same time, making for the kind of experience that you could easily drop dozens, if not hundreds, of hours into once it gets its hooks in.

To ease you in, there’s a basic single-player Story Mode that acts as a sort of extended tutorial for the various mechanics. The story is set on the fantasy continent of Bavrashka, where the titular Culdcept was a magical, all-powerful book that was destroyed, creating countless magical Culds that could be wielded by people called Cepters. Society has since reshaped itself around the acquisition and usage of Culds, and you take the role of a budding, talented new Cepter named Kamru whose father was one of the greatest Cepters to have ever lived.

Like countless other shonen stories, you begin in an academy where our spunky, gifted protagonist wows all onlookers with his battling skills as he learns magic and butts heads with rivals. But broader geopolitical conflicts are breaking out and a mysterious group seeks to reawaken an evil god who was sealed beneath the school in ages past.

Naturally, Kamru and his battling prowess are necessary to the effort to save the world, kicking off a grand adventure wherein all problems and conflicts are ultimately resolved by a few people who play cards together.

It’s nothing to write home about, but Story Mode is pretty clearly intended as an on-ramp for new and lapsed players to get up to speed with the various rules and strategies central to the board game. It shouldn’t take much more than a few hours to see everything it has to offer, but this can be padded with some additional side quest content if you’re particularly invested in the lore or some of the supporting characters. At worst, Story Mode is simply a forgettable inclusion; at best, it provides a cosy framing device for what can initially seem a rather obtuse core game.

Gameplay in Culdcept Begins has an interesting mixture of role-playing, board, and card game mechanics, striking a very fine balance between strategic depth and pure randomness. Matches take place upon a Monopoly-esque board that you gradually run laps around, gaining a significant infusion of income each time you manage to ‘Pass Go’ and complete another loop.

The board largely consists of empty ‘territory’ spaces, and as you naturally land upon empty ones after another dice roll, you can elect to place a creature from your hand upon the territory to occupy it, generating more income. The more territories you control, the more income you gain every lap, and you also gain income if another player lands on your territory and opts to pay a ‘toll’.

Very often, a player will instead choose to challenge you for the space before forking over the cash, and this is where combat enters the loop. Every creature has set attack and health stats, and the attacking player can select a creature from their hand that can overwhelm yours if you’re not careful.

Luckily, the defending creature not only gets passive stat benefits from being the incumbent, but the defending player can opt to play consumable item cards to bolster their creature and increase the odds of success. The attacker gets the space if they win, otherwise they're forced to pay the toll.

This leads to a dynamic game where the state of the board is constantly shifting between various states of safety and danger. After everyone’s completed the first lap or two, free territories start to become scarcer and there are portions of the board where you’ll need a narrow range of possible dice rolls to make it through unscathed. Once a territory has been claimed, its owner can also choose to invest income to level up the space, significantly raising both its value and toll to capitalise on an approaching opponent.

While dice rolls already introduce lots of variance, the mechanic of actions being dictated by a six-card hand ensures that no two matches are ever quite the same, even on the same board against the same opponent. You draw one card at the beginning of each turn from a deck of 40 you built in advance, and sometimes you’ve just got to roll with what you’ve got. Maybe you land on an unclaimed space, but don’t have a creature in your hand to claim it with. Maybe a foe is challenging one of your more vulnerable spaces and you don’t have an item available to prevent them from taking it from you.

If you construct a well-balanced deck, there are fewer moments where you’ll get caught off guard like this, but the constant risk makes each match quite thrilling. Especially in the later phases, the outcome of a single battle for territory can sometimes lead to a point swing that reaches well into the thousands, comfortably catapulting a distant second-place player into pole position. In this way, runaway victories aren’t tremendously common — you’re rarely so far behind the leader that victory is assured rounds in advance of it actually occurring.

To keep things interesting, matches can take place on a variety of unlockable boards that offer more than just a singular, linear loop to traverse. Some boards have dead ends you’re required to touch the end of and retrace your steps from, setting up alleys of territory that can shred an opponent’s pockets. Forked roads allow for multiple routes, granting the opportunity to avoid a risky path. Such redesigns don’t fundamentally alter the pace or flow of a match, but they add to the already significant replayability factor.

Deckbuilding takes place outside of matches, where you spend currency earned from match victories in the card shop either on specific cards to round out a deck or on blind packs, where you’re spending less for more in the hope of filling key gaps in your collection. When building a deck, you must strike a fine balance between creature cards of various elements, items to support them in battles, and spells to use for other one-off buffs like a specific dice roll or the ability to pull more cards on a turn.

The game gives you some guidance on what factors to consider, but there are premade decks if getting into the weeds of deckbuilding feels like too much. Additionally, there’s an option for players to generate and exchange codes for specific decks, allowing the community to step up and provide options for more variety.

I really appreciated the way the deckbuilding is handled here, as it offers room for tons of depth while not being overly confusing or crunchy. As your collection grows, lots of cards with interesting new effects become available, all but begging you to try them out with others you’re familiar with. Sometimes the experiment fails spectacularly, sometimes it goes surprisingly well, and through trial and error you gain a much deeper understanding of the mechanics and how you can create decks to counter specific strategies.

As far as multiplayer is concerned, the expected online suite significantly bolsters replayability, while the GameShare feature allows you to share the game with friends and play it with them off just one copy, in-person or online through GameChat. My only (mild) complaint here is that there’s no option for straight local multiplayer—everyone needs to have their own hardware, you can’t play on one screen and simply pass the controller.

Regarding its presentation, Culdcept Begins is perfectly satisfying, but feels perhaps a little cheap in some places. Story Mode is largely a collection of flat background images with basic sprites puppeted across with limited animation, and the card art in general is a little simplistic and unremarkable.

There’s some great overall cohesion between all the disparate art and UI elements, and nothing looks outright bad, but it feels like it was made on a shoestring budget. Compared to other CCGs like Shadowverse: Champion’s Battle or Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales, it comes off as looking a bit basic, though not to the extent of being off-putting.