[This review has been abriged for steam, but I think I managed to convey what I wanted.]

I’ve been thinking about Chrono Ark.

Or perhaps it would be more apt to say I’ve been thinking about why I’ve been thinking so much about Chrono Ark. A game that appears not only unnoteworthy in the gaming landscape at large, but even among its genre siblings seems to do little to stand out.

Is Slay the Spire the better game? I think so.
Have I spent more time playing Chrono Ark? Absolutely.
Why? I don’t rightly know—but let’s try to break it down.

Chrono Ark is a roguelike deckbuilder. Your deck is sourced from 5 different card pools. Card pool 1-4 is decided by the characters in your party. The 5th is your “card draw” skills—your main character’s. As you go through the game you acquire new cards for your different characters to craft a cohesive deck. You then utilize your increasingly optimized deck to defeat some bad guys, explode some bosses and finally beat your run.

The most interesting aspect of Chrono Ark’s deckbuilding is the necessity to synergize your deck across multiple characters. Every character belongs to one out of three roles, and are all equipped with a unique passive ability. This design goes a long way in helping to incentivize experimentation between the ability of one character with cards from another. What can be a boring card in one composition can be a complete game changer in another. This also means that the strategy of choice for each character depends less on what is “the best” and more on what is “the most fitting”.

In a way, however, this is also a weakness. Due to the large cast of characters, each individual card pool is relatively limited. This means that, on a per-character basis, the player’s skill expression becomes rather limited. Each character only has about two viable strategies to choose between—and the strategies are heavily reliant on the rare skill you acquire. It also means the act of acquiring new cards can be relatively unexciting. You either get one of the cards that support your strategy, or you don’t.

The card design itself is fun, if somewhat bloated with keywords and qualifiers. This is only somewhat true for the player’s own cards, but extremely obvious when dealing with enemy abilities. You will not get through a single boss in this game without properly reading every single line of text on every single ability. There is also very little reuse when it comes to mechanics between bosses and different enemies. This is as tiring as it is fun—which is to say it can be both, to a variable degree. To a tired or distracted mind, this can be irritating, but when you actively engage with it, it can be extremely fun to figure out. Some fights stand out above others, and the last boss especially stands out in both complexity and mechanical ingenuity.

Completing a run of Chrono Ark can be a rather cumbersome mission. Not only are the runs themselves relatively lengthy, but traversing the map and interacting with the game feels overly finicky. Rather than moving through the encounters with the click of a mouse, you have to physically traverse each map by trudging through the environment. Picking up items, unlocking chests, resting by the campfire etc. all takes more effort than it should. Traversal is even further bogged down by the need to be on the lookout for the rare skill book—of which a run (usually) contains only 2.

On a micro level Chrono Ark appears sparse, but on a macro level it is becomes surprisingly rich.

I won’t go too much into the story itself. Mostly because much of it is driven by plot or character reveals and partly because it is an affair all too familiar.

The concept is thus: the world has gone to ♥♥♥♥ and humanity has found reprieve inside a virtual world—the titular ‘ark’. Simple enough. Been there done that, right? Weeeell, yes and no. The concept itself is undoubtedly unoriginal—but again, what isn’t? The characters too are derivative for the most part. But the story’s strength lies not so much in the character writing or plot, but the concepts it handles. A lot of thought has obviously been put into the mechanics of the world and setting. This fact overshadows much of the shady writing and does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to engaging the player. So while I was never properly invested in the story or character drama, I was never distracted by contrivances or leaps of logic. It would be an easy task to either disassociate the gameplay from the story altogether, or contrive needless explanations for quirks of the gameplay, but Chrono Ark manages to navigate this minefield seamlessly.

While the story does overstay its welcome at parts, I never think it does anything to turn the player away from it. It simply makes sense. The world and the game you play within that world, that is. Though you are given ample reason to critique the writing, you are given little reason to question its logic. The text is boring, but not missguided. It always puts into the right place the right piece. Characters wax on about their woes in paragraph after paragraph, yet at the end, they manage through some effort to pull the story along to its conclusion. There is some unneeded strain put on certain parts of the plot, but the ideas it puts forth are coherent and worthwhile. The last reveal of the game also presents some nice food for thought—perhaps not wholly through the merit of its writing, but simply because the game marries the bridge between story and gameplay as well as it does.

The story’s strength comes from its genuinity and thoughtfulness. Whereas its weaknesses shows in its prose and delivery.

Chrono Ark looks uninspiring. There are no ifs and buts about it. This stands true for the main characters, the supporting cast, the enemies, bosses, and the environment. The art is not unpolished, however, and the game is sprinkled with enough flair that it does not become all-out boring.

The game looks as uninspiring as the character are written. The UI too suffers this ailment. Drab—that’s the word I’d use to describe it. When fighting an enemy, the interface is clear enough as to not present any problems, but the same cannot be said for navigating your inventory or other menus. Nothing is as easy as it should be. Be it equipping gear in a certain slot, or using an item in a specific way. Sometimes the outcome of an act is unclear before it is too late, other times it is just needlessly complex to perform a simple task.

The music, on the other hand, is great. For normal encounters and while exploring the map, it is unobtrusive but atmospheric. It is during boss fights and certain story beats that it really shines. Every area boss and every major scene in the story comes with a score that is either an ear-worm, or a straight up banger. Again, I feel the need to put extra emphasis on the story’s final boss fight which is amplified 1000x times by the score accompanying it.

Despite the development team's small size, and the game’s obviously limited budget, Chrono Ark has a surprising amount of CG to go with the story, as well as some nice animations for the character’s rare skills.

Chrono Ark is a strange mix of overly simplistic, yet overly convoluted. The story is a massive part of the game considering its genre. Though not always well written, it is heartfelt and interesting. The aesthetic is dull, but strangely effective at just the right times. The last boss of the story is probably the peak of what this genre has to offer, yet getting there can be a chore sometimes.

Chrono Ark is not in any of my lists of best games, and I would recommend it to others only with certain qualifiers. Yet, I’ve been thinking about this game a whole lot.

If this is AlFine’s first foray into the gaming industry, I cannot wait to see what their next game will deliver.