Image: Games People Play & Vsoo Games

As above, so below, and we're spiralling all the way down from John Gleep's cosmic casino and into the devil's own old-timey gambling den in The Devil's Due, our second game of iniquity and vice for the day. A roguelike card-battler about playing poker with the devil, but you've got to get through all seven layers of hell (and the delightfully grotesque gambling demons therein) to get to him. Good thing you're cheating all the way.

While a little more gritty than, say, Balatro, this is still only a game tangentially related to real gambling. Your goal is to fight your way through a series of demons, your attack strength based on the rank of the hand you're playing after discards, and your defense (which any attacking enemy has to beat) being the sum total of all the cards in your hands. Simple, fair, easy to understand, plus you get a slight advantage in that you always attack first.

While the first level of hell (Gluttony) is easy enough to get through, with its inhabitants mostly playing fair, things escalate quickly, with my first run ended by My Dad (represented by a faceless, disapproving figure behind a morning newspaper), who had more than a few double-sided cards in his deck, able to flip values around to boost the value of the hand he's playing. Unfair, and much as I abused everything I could, I sank after a couple bad hands.

And so to even the odds, you cheat. Constantly. Over the course of the run, you develop a whole bunch of cheating powers that you're intended to use. Nudge cards one value higher to create a better hand, flip the values of some, invert the values. Each cheat action chips away at the suspicion gauge over your opponent's head, and if you max it out, their next attack becomes unblockable, but you're fully expected to push your luck to get that killer hand.

And of course, this being a deckbuilder, you can change your deck. Add card values together, chop two cards together into double-sided reversible ones (playable as either value), and generally stack the odds in your favor, while buying the occasional cursed artifact to boost certain hands or give you a few extra Get Out Of Jail (death) Free cards. From the few rounds I've played, there's some interesting strategy immediately at play, with a lot of additional playstyles and challenges to unlock.

It goes practically without saying that The Devil's Due is a striking-looking game. A mixture of hand-drawn art stitched together into paper-doll art, with the occasional bit of weird clipart or classical work woven into the mix. Always nice to see a game finding an aesthetic that's bordering on the unique, or at least rare enough to stand out.

The enemies you're up against are a colorful lot, and while some of them are a little bit overplayed (Mr Creosote from that infamous Monty Python sketch is an enemy and blows up after four hands if you don't beat him first), most of the jokes land. The whole tone is Hieronymus Bosch by way of South Park, and from what I've seen so far, I think it works, and a nice perk on top of being a solid bit of card-battling fun.

The Devil's Due is out now for £13/$14, with a 20% launch discount until November 24th. And folks who've taken a risk on gambling-themed games get a bit shaved off the price, if you own Card Shark (fantastic, and from the sadly now-defunct Nerial), Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers or Decktamer.