 If you're subscribed to the channel or a long time viewer, you know me. I love deckbuilders and card games as a whole. I enjoyed my time with Noah Prophet, I'm happy to say, but I do have some issues with it. What does Noah Prophet do right? The team is our first big winner. The game's got a really cool Mad Max aesthetic. The world display in Noah Prophet is a post-apocalyptic one. Civilization has climbed down its lofty ladder, and turned quite a bit more unpalatable than we would like it to be. Deserts, swamps, and mountainous landscapes make for equally dangerous pathways on your Prophet's path towards salvation, and it's not even 2050 yet. This game draws inspiration from Slade Aspire in several obvious ways, but it very much makes the familiar formula its own, throughout strong identity that it claims, and many unique mechanics which add dimensions you simply don't have in SDS. Like Slade Aspire, Noah Prophet makes use of randomly generated maps and events. Unlike SDS, the focus is not on one single character. Usibilities grow in power, the better their deck becomes, but on an entire caravan. For a close comparison in terms of caravan management, Banner Saga comes to mind, although in the most basic sense, with the need to keep a close look at a pair of resources, food, and hope, without which your situation turns from bad to worse without delay. After your first few runes, you amass a respectable amount of unlocks for each starting option you pick, both in terms of leader decks and convoy decks. These two different decks warrant to mention. For one unlike in Griftlands, where you had a battle and negotiation decks, you use both simultaneously. In the leader deck, you'll find all kinds of handy abilities that will differentiate, depending on which would-be prophet you play with. Your convoy deck is where you'll play some of the members of your caravan. Some, but not all. And this is one of Noah Prophet's elements that I like best. Just because you pick up a follower doesn't mean you're locked into using them. You can play around with the up to 24 follower limit for your caravan deck to try and set some synergy between them. Let's get back to the architect of games, how the miller's tree requisites for what makes a good card game. I say back because I've used him in my Griftlands video, which you can see somewhere on the screen in a card or some such. The cards need to enable synergy is the first of these three points. The second is they need to create interesting decisions in the long term. Entered but not least, the cards need to have a distinct identity. My biggest pee with Noah Prophet is it fails at allowing the player to better create synergy in their deck. While the starting convoy decks each have different teams in the beginning of a synergy, whether you'll be able to develop that synergy is anybody's guess. So much here is down to chance random events. Do you get a random event in which you might save some scavengers and add them to your crazy religious caravan? Or do you have high enough altruism to persuade certain foes that you have beaten and who's a surrender you have accepted to join you? Now if you don't have that high enough altruism rating, tough luck. The best way to do it then is with batteries. And marketplaces, which offer about a dozen different cards each, do allow you to develop synergy. Batteries for directed are the resources that you use in lieu of a more traditional currency such as gold. If you play smart, if you're lucky enough to have scavenged enough food and gotten enough sellable resources that will bring in that battery catch, then you can make a full use of the market. But if you have struggled with any of your resource management, the task of synergizing your deck as to your wishes becomes increasingly more difficult. This isn't a clear cut issue and the synergy you'll have fluctuates between different funds. Perhaps it's the sheer amount of caravan cards in the game that make this more challenging. A greater volume of cards an offer at the market might offset that, as could some additional choices during events. A greater control as it were given to the player and less reliant on RNG. This reminds me, you can get points in one of three spheres I suppose. Science, religion, altruism. Each one opens up new choices. Getting points in these is at once very logical and elusive. If you choose inquisitive options during random events you'll get science points. If you chose the universe and say mystical stuff to your followers you'll get religious juju. And if you're nice and not a murder hobo, you might just gain points for being an altruist. Where this falls apart a little bit is, for example, when you defeat an enemy except their surrender and are then unable to accept any of the enemy's followers in your own convoy, because your altruism points are not high enough. How the actual bandits know that that is so, I cannot explain. My only guess is that perhaps there's an international board of observers watching everyone in the deserts and swamps of this world in keeping track, posting the information on some sort of online forum. Or it is a problem I can only describe as mechanics being divorced from thematics. So for example, whenever you reach an outpost to rest and explore in between the dangerous wilds you're offered the choice to heal five times. Each time you heal either your character for five health or three of your wounded followers. Each time you heal also makes use of food. Why are you limited to this choice? Mechanically this is an example of time and resource management. You often be in the position to gamble between how far you're willing to risk your convoy followers and how far you're willing to risk your leader's neck. Thematically there is no reason that's established as to why you have to leave that safe space anytime at all before everyone in your convoy is healed up. None. And for the record this could have been done in a single throwaway flavor sentence as soon as you enter one of these safe zones. When I say safe zone here I do not mean your traditional safe point in the game. This is a roguelite. What I do mean however is that these are places where you have this tennis veneerous civilization somehow surviving and people attempting to build something. To return to the science points and so forth this doesn't work well as a system to encourage the making of interesting long-term decisions. The warding of these points is too arbitrary and even though some opening convoy decks can give you an opening quantity of scientist points that doesn't help with the overall arbitrary nature I described. Further it shoeholens you in down a certain path if you want to optimize any tree, any one among the three types of points. Which makes the game less interesting and really takes away from your freedom as it were. In terms of difficulty this is among the harder deck builders I've played but not in an unfair way as some complain. Most of the times I died I could pinpoint the moment I had made a mistake that caused me to run. It's challenging sure enough but the kind of challenging that makes you want to go back and give the game another try. If the tools we had to improve for a better calibrated toe this would see a lot of the complaints that the difficulties met with go away. Difficulty spikes, the occasional bloated titling mess. These are real issues and they are annoying without a doubt. Something else the game differentiates itself by is the positioning on the map. A grid of rows and columns with individual spots of your cards and units to occupy which as you've seen by now fluctuates wildly between different encounters. Units on the map can attack only if they are in the front of their row, either individual enemy followers or the enemy leader directly. That is with the exception of snipers who can stand behind other units and still attack. You've got your taunt followers, you've got straight to the face bunchy boys that just go all out as soon as you put them on the board and plenty of other very familiar types of minions. Some card types are actively hindered by smaller rows for example. In all of them force you to adapt strategies and take into account debris and the items occasionally spawned at the beginning of an encounter. The combat itself is exactly what every card game should strive towards, fun, addictive and engaging. Whether I succeeded into shaping a deck into something proper or into a miscellaneous body of followers whose abilities don't mush together well, I wanted to pit them against the progressively more difficult opponents my profits faced. So too for the exploration. The ability to double down on paths and explore every single node on every map, if you have the resources and the patience, is another way in which the game differentiates itself while reinforcing that team of desperate convoys struggling to survive and grow in a world set on stopping it at every point. Is nowhere profit a perfect game? Hardly. But it is a very good one. Tapping into the card game's equivalent to strategies, one more turn, syndrome, we're exploring just one more node, fighting just one more battle is such fun that you inevitably look at the time and realise it's 3 in the morning and you haven't even had dinner yet. Thank you for watching, if you enjoyed this video please like it, share, subscribe to the channel, ring that bell button for all the future notifications and leave a comment. Have you played nowhere profit? Are you planning on trying it out now that you've seen it? It is I should mention free with or rather available with the Xbox Game Pass for PC subscription which continues to be very much excellent. It's how I played it and I'm and I'm very happy to recommend the mall to you. It has over a hundred excellent games and I have only scratched the surface of all the ones I want to try out. I'll see you next time. Bye!