The Devil’s Due is now available on Steam for Windows, offering a fairly compelling reason to abandon good manners at the card table. Norwegian studio Games People Play launched its poker roguelite on 10 November, and a 20% launch discount currently brings the UK price down from £12.99 to £10.39.
You begin having already lost your soul to the Devil, which is an awkward opening position for anybody hoping to make a sensible exit. Getting it back means working through Hell and winning a series of poker duels against demonic opponents with their own abilities.
Hands provide the foundation for combat, with their poker strength determining damage and the total value of the cards contributing to defence. The twist is that you and your opponent draw from the same deck, so changing its contents has consequences on both sides of the table.
That makes building a powerful combination more complicated than simply adding every useful card you find. A modification that works beautifully with your current tricks could also hand the enemy something rather unpleasant to throw back at you.
Those tricks are where the game encourages you to get creative. You can conceal and swap cards, manipulate values or interfere with an opponent’s hand, building combinations around the cheats and relics available during a run. Playing honestly is allowed to look increasingly like a poor life choice.
There is a limit to how much nonsense the opposition will tolerate, though. Cheating raises a suspicion meter, and pushing it too far triggers a furious response, turning each attempt to improve your position into another risk to weigh up.
Between encounters, tarot cards determine a route through battles, shops and healing shrines, with minigames adding more opportunities to bend the rules. Runs also unlock further cheats and relics, giving subsequent attempts different tools to work with when the previous plan ends badly.
The official Steam page has the current UK offer and more details on the shared-deck system. With its grotesque opponents and deliberately crooked approach to poker, The Devil’s Due is making a strong case for checking everybody’s sleeves before games night.