You know Gloomhaven? I’ve written about the board game and I’ve written about the steam game. Heck, I even wrote about the pinball game.
It’s a game that I love and a game that I recommend (currently 60% off, even!). Frosthaven announced that they were taking applications for a closed demo and, heck yeah, I clicked the link! Sadly, I didn’t get in. Ah, well. I can wait.
Then, last week, THE DEMO CAME OUT! And I downloaded! Now, I wanted to be able to devote at least an hour to the game and that was hard to do with work and life and Expedition 33 and all that so it wasn’t until about Thursday that I finally was able to open the game and give it a good look.
Now, I don’t want to brag or anything, but I have a couple hundred hours or so in Gloomhaven (this goes back to 2021, remember… came out when we were still in heavy socially distancing territory) and I have the “I beat the game” achievement as well as the “I unlocked *EVERYBODY* in a single campaign!” achievement. I’d like to think that I’m familiar with the game.
And it’s with that background that I want you to know the following: Frosthaven’s Demo has me saying “what the heck?”
Not because the game is bad, necessarily, but because the UI has turned from “okay, a little confusing, maybe” to “what in the heck is going on?”
Here are a couple of pictures giving some of the superficial differences. Here’s Gloomhaven:
Here’s Frosthaven:
It’s hard to explain but I sat down at Gloomhaven and, after a couple of minutes, figured out what is going on. “Oh, this is just like the board game!”, I thought. It took me a bit to figure out how to not suck at the game but I figured it out enough to beat the game once.
I sat down at Frosthaven and I thought “wait… how come nothing is working right?” It’s like they changed the UI to be less intuitive. I mean, superficially, they just changed a little bit of where the numbers are, right? But they’ve changed the phrasing on the cards, you no longer “Curse” enemies (with handy purple lightning bolt symbol for flavor), you now “purple lightning bolt symbol” them. You no longer move (boot symbol) 3, you now (boot symbol) 3.
Over and over, I found myself asking “wait, what the heck?” and trying to figure out how to make the game do what I wanted it to do.
If you enjoyed Gloomhaven, you should check out Frosthaven’s (FREE!) demo and see what I’m talking about. If you haven’t tried Gloomhaven, I recommend picking it up for the $14 that Steam is currently charging for it.
As it is, when it comes to Frosthaven, I’m waiting to see whether the folks in charge of Frosthaven have a response to the feedback that I’m sure they’re getting.
So… what are you playing?
(Title image is a screenshot of the Main Menu of Frosthaven. All screenshots taken by the author.)
