Neurodeck Review — Russell Troxel

Mar 29

Mar 29 Neurodeck Review

The human mind is a bizarre thing and phobias are one of the best examples of its peculiarities. I am a big man with enough intelligence and physical fortitude to not be in any danger from the vast majority of spiders, and honestly the rest wouldn’t be that much of a challenge. In spite of that, the lump of electric meat that is my brain will fly into a feral panic at the sight of any spider, seeking either the nearest aerosolized poison or, failing that, to vacate the space as quickly as possible. It’s nonsense, but fascinating nonsense. Since I will never have the emotional strength to go through exposure therapy nor the time to academically study psychology, I thought the third-best way to examine this was by playing Neurodeck, a deckbuilder game about psychology and phobia recovery released last week by Tavrox Games.

In Neurodeck, players are working to help a person conquer their various phobias. This is done using a deck of cards representing a variety of coping mechanisms. These cards are deployed against manifested avatars of the phobias in one-on-one psychological combat. In between these confrontations, players will visit real-world areas to improve their stats, gain new abilities, and improve and refine their deck. If the player manages to defeat every encounter, new emotions are unlocked to use, which function as new character classes, for subsequent runs.

After every fight, players can add one card to their deck from a selection of cards. The available cards are picked from the character’s cards as well as the emoition’s card pool.

Each enemy represents a phobia and is a hyperbolic horror embodying that fear.

If that introduction sounds sparse and standard to the roguelite genre, that’s because it is. I was mildly surprised how by-the-numbers and bare-bones Neurodeck is and a great example of this is the game’s story, or lack thereof. Aside from a short blurb on the game’s main menu, there is no justification or explanation why the player or the characters are doing or what the Neurodeck is. During the phobia confrontations, it seems like the game is taking place inside a character’s mind, but all of the non-combat encounters appear to be places in the real world, such as a gym or a classroom. Are these areas some kind of archetypal construct inside the character’s mind, or is the character moving in and out of the Neurodeck? Speaking of it, what actually is the Neurodeck? The name “Neurodeck” is used to refer to both the deck of crystalized coping mechanisms and the ambiguous device that creates the simulation in which players combat phobias. I was frustrated with how vague the story and character motivations were while playing, especially because it seemed like there were solid building blocks of what could be a story. Given the two characters and the contents of the game, it feels like a story about a professor and their research assistant developing a new radical technology for psychological healing is just out of reach. If the game had this framework, with each run through the game being a trial run of their new device, I think I would have liked Neurodeck more, and it would have given clearer motivation to why I was playing.

But even if this or any other sort of story was put into place, I would still have issues because I’m not convinced the theme of psychological healing and conquest of phobias is all that well reflected in the game play. When combating a phobia, the objective is to reduce it to zero health and all of the cards a player has either inflict damage or provide some supportive effect to make sure the phobia runs out of health before the player does. So damage to the phobia is an abstract representation of the character conquering their fear. With that being the case, a lot of cards don’t make sense. I’m not trained in psychology, but I fail to understand how things like a liver cramp, frowning, or punching a wall is going to help someone get over a fear. I can pet dogs and eat spicy food all day long but if you bring a spider near me, I will forget all of those nice activities and run away. In addition to not being effective, some of these cards seem like they depict unhealthy coping mechanisms. I think if you’re seeing a psychologist that recommends an afternoon brooding over past wrongs and drinking an entire bottle of whiskey as a way to beat your agoraphobia, you should probably get a new psychologist.

Between conflicts, players can visit a variety of non-combat areas that help them improve their character and deck.

The surveys are a great fusion of the game’s mechanics and theme, a height not achieved by much else in Neurodeck. — The surveys are a great fusion of the game’s mechanics and theme, a height not achieved by much else in *Neurodeck*.

It’s not all bad in Neurodeck though. Setting aside the iffy theme, there are some interesting mechanics in the game. The first one that caught my eye was the items system. Most cards are actions, which have an effect when played and then are discarded, but somewhere between a quarter and a third are items, which equip when played and can be used a set number of times before being discarded. The main advantage to item cards is that using an equipped item does not cost any of the player’s stamina, the energy used to play cards. I liked this because it allowed me to have turns where I would play several cards, nearly depleting my stamina, and then follow those up with a turn where I used my items to finish off the phobia. It gives players a new strategic opportunity by circumventing normal resource limitations and I quite enjoyed it. Another cool aspect is how the cards in each emotion work together.

My favorite example of this is the anger emotion, which has a significant focus on discarding cards for more explosive effects. Several cards in the anger category scale in power with how many cards are discarded and others have the special effect of being played while discarded. The most successful run I had was focused on building up a hefty handful of cards and then throwing them all away for a flurry of damage. Largely unconnected to the previous two features, the third thing that I enjoyed about Neurodeck was the game’s traits system. Traits are persistent, passive abilities that are acquired in an interesting way: players fill out a survey with questions regarding feelings and hypothetical situations and are then awarded a trait in keeping with their answers. The questions aren’t terribly sophisticated and only two traits are on offer in any one survey, so it’s not a fantastic system but I liked it because it was one of the few ways the game’s mechanics matched with the theme. Plus, the straightforwardness of the questions make it easier for players to get whichever of the two perks work better for them.

Along with each non-combat encounter, players are treated to a diary entry from the main character. They don’t have any effect on the game but they’re interesting characterization.

To me, Neurodeck feels like a game whose reach exceeds its grasp. I think there’s a solid core idea, examining mental health through a very approachable game genre, but it just hasn’t translated. Thanks to the speed of the internet, it looks like the developers already know that, so hopefully I can revisit it in my yearly Russell Revisits article to better result. At this point, it’s not unreasonably priced but for only $11 more, you can get a much better deckbuilder that also happens to be one of 2020’s best games. For all its flaws, Neurodeck is still a functional game that is likely to be improved in the near future, but I just can’t justify paying full price for it.