Shards of Order Review

A deck-builder that ditches the randomness and hands you a real story instead.

Before you start touching a single card, it is good to know where this all came from. Coming from developer Fardust and publisher Awaken Realms, the team behind Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon, if you've even dipped a toe into that world, you already know the kind of gothic slow-burn fantasy to expect from Shards of Order.

You might be going into the game thinking it's just another deck-builder, but that skepticism soon evaporates once the combat starts. Shards of Order completely strays from the typical roguelike run-based formula. After launching on July 28th, the developers have provided a free demo on Steam for players to sample the mechanics firsthand without any commitment.

The pitch is basically the following: take the deck-building depth of something like Slay the Spire, strip out the roguelike bones, and graft it onto a proper turn-based RPG with a full story, permanent progress, and characters who actually stick around. Nothing resets when you fail.

There's no run structure where a bad shuffle early on dooms you to starting over from scratch. Everything you unlock, every piece of gear you find, every point you sink into a skill tree stays with you, which already puts Shards of Order in a different lane from most of the genre. The world you're dropped into is falling apart at the seams.

Long ago, a warlord named Morgain tried to conquer everything, and while his campaign ultimately failed, the wreckage he left behind never really healed. The old laws that used to hold reality together, the rules governing life, death, time, identity, have been broken or stolen outright, and without them the world is stuck in a kind of slow, endless decay. Nobody can properly die anymore.

People get killed and simply come back, over and over, which has driven plenty of them mad and turned some into shambling husks that wander the ruins.

You wake up thrown into a pit in a place called Purge Village, wearing the armor of the Black Wind Legion, a group of knights responsible for a lot of the suffering going on. You don't remember who you are, and to make things stranger, another soldier in that same armor recognizes you and blames you for something you have no memory of doing.

A voice starts talking inside your head almost immediately, and it's clear early on that whatever it is, it isn't friendly; it sticks with you the entire way through Shards of Order, feeding you information about the world while never quite feeling trustworthy.

A big part of what makes the opening hours of Shards of Order work is that you're figuring things out right alongside your character, with barely any hand-holding. Your first real goal is recovering the Law of Identity, which happens during the opening hours and finally gives you your name and your past back, so this isn't a game built around permanent amnesia; it's more of a jumping-off point.

From there, the real quest begins: tracking down the rest of the scattered laws so order can be restored to the land. Along the way, you pick up two companions, an exiled archer and a disgraced scholar, both of whom remember just as little about themselves as you did at the start.

Between duty and obsession, Shards of Order carves out a deck-builder with real moral weight.

The archer lost her tribe to the Black Wind Legion and is chasing down a figure named Landre for reasons of duty, while the scholar is chasing the same person out of something closer to obsession. Neither companion is purely good — the archer tends to push you toward the more merciful choices, while the scholar is the one nudging you toward the ruthless option, arguing that the outcome justifies whatever you had to do to get there.

You'll travel through very different regions on the way, including the Breathless Sands, the Frozen Marina, and the Cathedral of Order, each with its own flavor of dread. Side content isn't just filler either; there are quests where you're asked to dig up a corpse and choose what kind of brain to put back in it, or moments where you have to pick between saving a baker or a healer, knowing you can't save both.

Choices like these get remembered by the world and can come back around later, sometimes in ways you didn't expect. There's even a surprising amount of dark humor scattered through Shards of Order, which keeps the tone from becoming pure misery even as the subject matter stays heavy.

Structurally, Shards of Order isn't the point-A-to-point-B node map you'd expect from a roguelike-adjacent deck-builder. You explore full, handcrafted locations packed with events, riddles, side content, and small dungeons rather than randomly generated paths. One area, for example, hides an alchemy lab where you're hunting down the right recipe to mix a particular potion.

Areas can be revisited once you've opened up the map further.

Some gates simply won't budge until you've found a specific key or picked up a skill strong enough to get past them, so backtracking with new tools in hand is part of the design rather than something the game punishes you for. Combat is where Shards of Order really breaks from the pack, and it's the single biggest reason people end up recommending it.

There's no turn order and no mana bar. Instead, every enemy has a countdown timer floating above its head, and every card you play eats into that timer for every enemy on the field. Playing a cheap, fast card barely moves the needle, so you can often chain a few of those together before anything reacts.

Drop a big, expensive card instead, and you might buy yourself a strong hit or a major setup, but you're also handing multiple enemies the chance to act at once, which can turn into a brutal counterattack if you're not careful. Even drawing new cards eats into that clock, unless you've already chained three cards together in a row, in which case your next draw comes free.

It creates a rhythm you won't have seen in Slay the Spire or Monster Train, because you're not managing energy or turn order so much as reading a ticking clock and deciding how much of it you're willing to spend. On top of the timers, you've got positioning, status effects like bleeding and poison, and enemies who can weaken your team's output if you let them set up.

Death doesn't really work for your side either.

When a character's health hits zero, they don't die outright; they just get knocked into a crippled state, and reviving them costs a special card whose time cost gets worse with every fall. Enemies follow a similar logic on their end, coming back to life a few seconds after being downed unless your whole team can wipe them out together, which forces you to think about timing kills rather than just chipping away one enemy at a time.

There's also a resource in the corner of the screen tied to an all-seeing god you can pray to once per fight for a full team revive, though that favor always comes with strings attached, and leaning on it too often can quietly lock you out of certain story endings later on.

The strengths and weaknesses of Shards of Order come forward from just one core design choice: there is no lucky, overpowered build waiting for you on the other end to carry your character through this trial, nor is there bad early RNG to blame a failed attempt on.

Instead, what it offers is a consistently tough fight that resembles more of a card-based Dark Souls. Some fights require entire deck rewrites, and it's not unusual to spend a dozen attempts on a single boss. The biggest drawback to this strict balance is that complex card combos require lots of setup, which short encounters just aren't incentivized enough right now to pay off, leading to a defensive playstyle instead of flashier synergies.

Each of your three characters plays completely differently, which keeps things interesting once you've got the whole party.

The soldier is your main character and the easiest to lean on early, building up shields and rage to become either a wall that eats hits for the team or a straight-up damage dealer, and he can move around the battlefield for free once specced that way. The archer needs her quiver loaded with arrows before she can really swing a fight, so she asks for a little more patience but pays it back with big single hits and enemy-weakening effects.

The scholar generates mana passively off the damage your other two characters deal, which makes him feel more like a support piece layered on top of whatever the soldier and archer are doing rather than an independent damage source, handling buffs, debuffs, and poison effects that are especially useful against bosses.

The way Shards of Order works is in terms of progression, which goes directly into deck-building and tends to operate in tandem. Once players hit a difficulty wall, repeat kills stop netting XP, so for the time being there is no grinding lower-stakes fights to maximize character stats.

There is a lack of manual saves, as well, which is also a pretty big limitation—when there are no manual saves, testing out new builds on previous fights means relying entirely on checkpoints. There may be small combat hitches, but the developers are still churning out patches for it, and every time you experience an error, a bug-reporting prompt pops up automatically to get detailed info about what's gone wrong.

Visually, Shards of Order leans hard into its dark fantasy identity from start to finish.

It backs that mood up with details that actually matter in play — your soldier's appearance shifts as his rage builds, and every new piece of armor changes how each character looks on the field, so you can often read a fight just by glancing at your party rather than digging through menus.

The backdrops behind each battle are consistently strong, and the animation work holds up well for a deck-builder, a genre that doesn't always put much effort into that side of things. The sound design and score are what really impressed me about Shards of Order, really carrying much of the burden in creating such an austere portion of its heavy atmosphere.

This is not a fully voiced RPG; however, key story moments and certain cutscenes have voice acting, but overwhelming amounts of dialogue and lore are just text shown as unvoiced reading. You have to be in it for the long haul, and if you are wading through it at night when fatigued from long work days or parenting (or both), large chunks of narrative will most likely go over your head.

Taken as a whole, Shards of Order is a demanding, story-heavy deck-builder that trades the chaos of a roguelike for a linear campaign clocking in around twenty hours, and it earns that trade with genuinely inventive combat, a cast worth following, and a dying world that feels lived-in rather than randomly stitched together.

It won't land for everyone.

If you're chasing the thrill of a new randomized run every time or you want deep branching dialogue on the scale of something like Baldur's Gate 3, you'll likely walk away wanting more than Shards of Order is built to give you. 

But if a dark, focused RPG with a combat system unlike anything else on the market sounds appealing, it's earned its early reputation, sitting around 96% positive with players so far, and the free demo is sitting right there if you want to see for yourself before committing.