Gordian Quest Review (Switch eShop)

Gordian Quest, like many games of its ilk, is bogged down by dense, cumbersome menus and volumes of small text. But unlike a lot of other games in the strategy and deckbuilding genre, it's much easier to wrap your mind around and isn't mired in frustratingly long tutorials and steep learning curves. Weaving tabletop inspirations into deckbuilding gameplay creates a fun, replayable game that lacks teeth, but provided enough satisfaction to keep us engaged, even if its myriad of meddlesome menus made it a struggle.

The game is presumably named after the Gordian Knot, a mythical knot so difficult to untie it became a proto-Arthurian, sword-in-the-stone-type legend used to anoint Alexander the Great as the Chosen One / God-King / Emperor over the Macedonian Empire after he, as the legend has it, sliced it atwain. If that's the case, it's ironic that this game's menus are so difficult to navigate that they too require some divine sense of inspiration to be able to cut through. This may sound like hyperbole, but doing something as simple as equipping a weapon felt like a Sisyphean task, even when its menus were clearly legible.

Before we get to that, the positives. In the bulk of the game, combat absolutely sings. It runs well, it has some good depth to it, and a lot of the characters' decks have really great synergy that adds a satisfying level of metagaming as you try your best to set up a potent combo of cards in Gordian Quest's grid-based combat.

It boasts a solid roguelite mode. It's not quite as solid as the main campaign mode, but it's a great way to wrap your mind around Gordian Quest's combat loop before hopping into its campaign.

There's also some cool tabletop-style roleplaying, with moments where your character or party may need to roll for a check to loot a room or dodge a trap like in Dungeons and Dragons. And, to add a bit more flair to these D-20-based checks, you can temporarily sacrifice one of your characters' cards to add a boost to your roll. It adds some nice risk/reward elements that feel roguelike-adjacent as you explore a dungeon. These moments also show off some of Gordian Quest's art style.

Unfortunately, a lot of these moments are bookended by scenarios that, while well-written, are splayed out in text that is not legible when playing on a TV. The text isn't as hard to read in handheld, but it was just small enough to give this reviewer some eye strain.

That's not the only issue that seems to be a result of a poorly thought-out PC-to-Switch transition. To illustrate, let's walk through what, in our opinion, would feel right for equipping a weapon: You go into the character menu; using the D-pad or control stick, you cycle over to the weapon section on the character's menu; after pressing the 'A' button, your cursor moves over to the tab in the menu with the weapons in it and, if your character can wield the weapon you were hoping to equip, it slots into the weapon spot on your character's page.

Now let's walk through what happens when trying to equip a weapon in Gordian Quest: You go into the character menu; using the D-pad or control stick, you cycle over the weapon slot on your character sheet; after selecting it, it pulls up the weapon tab to the right of your character menu. But, instead of simply pressing the 'A' button to equip something, pressing 'A' over a selected piece of gear seemingly does nothing. And, if you try to navigate out of the menu section containing the desired gear, you'll find yourself stuck! Now how does one escape this infernal user interface oversight? Surely trying to navigate through the menu using the button prompts provided at the top of the menu might unlock something.

Pressing 'R', you tab over to the next section of your inventory, hoping to find an escape. Wrong again! This time, trying to cycle back to the gear section of the menu by pressing 'L', you find that the UI is stuck. Instead of registering the 'L' button as a prompt to tab left, it's reading it (mysteriously) as a prompt to slide to the left on the right control stick, which is used to cycle through the submenus underneath the ones you navigate using 'L' and 'R'. Now, you're stuck in an even smaller section of a menu with no discernible way out.

So then how, how in the world do you equip the damn sword?! First, after selecting it and receiving no feedback from the game or its UI, you have to press the '-' button, which takes you to yet another menu section at the top of the screen. Then, you need to scroll all the way over to the left at the top of the screen, all the way down and back to the weapon slot on your character menu, and press 'A'. Confused? What's most frustrating is that this bug appears at random, adding to its confusing nature.

To add insult to injury, it's as easy as can be to unequip: all you need to do is press 'X' over an item and it goes away! On top of that, it's pretty easy to navigate these same issues using the touchscreen in handheld mode.

Gordian Quest is by no means unplayable, but it's full of these kinds of frustrating issues. This is one example of a handful of deeply annoying oversights that make small stuff a total chore, but you'll find such UI-related bugs in a number of places. Like navigating its Mario 3-style overworld map, where pop-ups from previous combat encounters linger, preventing you from progressing unless you mash the pause button. Many of these issues are patchable, which is just as well — at launch, at least, there's plenty to patch.