Heretic's Fork on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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Dear candidate, we are pleased to invite you to take up the position of manager of Hell. You will punish sinners by using our deck-building computer system to construct hellish towers capable of keeping the endless hordes of the underworld in check. Best of luck!
Heretic's Fork is a deckbuilding, tower defense and arcade game
developed by 9FingerGames
and published by Ravenage Games.
Released on September 13th 2023 is available only on Windows
in 9 languages: English, French, German, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Spanish - Spain, Portuguese - Portugal, Traditional Chinese and Russian.
It has received 3,500 reviews of which 2,998 were positive and 502 were negative resulting in a rating of 8.3 out of 10. 😎
The game is currently priced at 9.75€ on Steam, but you can find it for 1.02€ on Instant Gaming.
The Steam community has classified Heretic's Fork into these genres:
System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- OS: Microsoft 64bit Windows 10
- Processor: 64bit Intel compatible Dual Core CPU
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: OpenGL 4-compliant onboard graphics
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 2 GB available space
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
A Roguelike core under the Tower-Defense surface: Successful ideas and slightly failed practices 7/10 Opening Since the Dota 2 community workshop released Dota Auto Battler in 2019, the game genre of Auto Battler has gradually become popular. In the second half of 2019, Teamfight Tactics and Hearthstone's Battlegrounds mode pushed the popularity of Auto Battler as a game type to a peak. Many Indie games have been using it as the main gameplay since then. Heretic's Fork, characterized by dark fantasy and avant-garde punk visual art, is a roguelike game that incorporates deck building and tower defense elements into the gameplay of auto battler. The novel, interesting and refreshing gameplay can make players addicted to it within a few hours of getting started. Unfortunately, this popularity came and went quickly. The game's levels and enemy designs were too monotonous and repetitive, and the strong balance between different structures was terrible, making it impossible to continue to bring freshness to players. Strength Integrating the three primary game mechanisms of tower defense, deck building, and auto battler is indeed a bold attempt, and in this regard, the initial impression left on players by Heretic's Fork is excellent. Players need to make operational decisions through deck drawing and card upgrades. The diverse character characteristics, numerous active skills, and unique card effects give the game multiple diverse gameplay styles. With metal rock and synthesizer electronic music as the themes, the sometimes passionate and sometimes slow music not only echoes the art style of the Heretic's Fork but also adds a lot of fun and immersion to this auto battler game. The game's main menu interface is designed to imitate a computer operating system, and there are many Easter eggs for players to discover. At 2x speed, the game lasts about half an hour for each run, which is a relatively suitable time. For the vast majority of players, within the first ten hours of playing the game, they will be attracted by its refreshing, creative and appealing gameplay and will be reluctant to leave. Weakness Unfortunately, as players spend more time playing the game, Heretic's Fork's multiple shortcomings gradually become apparent. The levels and enemies in the game are very similar in design. The types of maps and enemies are intensely single and fixed, the high difficulty only increases the enemy's spawn rate, health, movement speed, and resistance, which is the most boring numerical expansion. Among the only two structures in the game, garrison, and towers, the towers are too strong, and even among them, the unholy critical hit is the strongest and most brainless. Due to this imbalance design, players have very few strategy choices at high difficulty, With the maximum number of cards being more than 280, the inability to filter through streamlined card pools has instead affected the player's gaming experience. The game's target acquisition logic is highly rigid and often results in incredibly inefficient performance. For some structures such as Judgment and Sawblade, players cannot freely choose their locations likewise. From the perspective of data visualization and player experience optimization, Heretic's Fork has done a terrible job. In addition to the fact that upgrading card action often leads to banishing due to unintentionally overlap, the upgrade bonuses obtained are not intuitively displayed in the game through numbers, and players have to calculate them themselves. When selecting cards reward, you cannot view the upgrade items as well. When checking decks, there is a bug that prevents all cards from being fully displayed. Some scenes in the game also have frequent screen flickering, which does not give players a comfortable visual experience. Conclusion A qualified Roguelike should start from the most fundamental and gradually progress to the complex, unlocking all the content provided in the game through player exploration, and obtaining a different gaming experience in each playthrough under a highly randomized game mechanism. The design of Heretic's Fork makes the fun and essence of the game almost entirely concentrated in the first few hours of players' learning. Players' mid-to-late game experience is increasingly homogenized due to the lack of randomness. The avant-garde punk visual art cannot bring continuous visual stimulation to players in the game due to its pixelated style as well. Perhaps it is most appropriate to regard the game as a snackable Indie game, which is destined not to be a game that can bring lasting fun to players. Found my review valuable? [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43837750-Just-Game-Curator/] Follow my curator to get the latest review push! Your support is my greatest motivation!
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It is incredibly alright. Perfectly decent. Quite playable. The mechanics are engaging while you're learning them, and feel pretty alright to exploit when you've mastered them. The art is definitely average or better. But, like, you see the problem? Nothing about the game is truly spectacular. There's no moment where it really CLICKS and you love it. You get to the end of a run, and you're eager to push through Endless, except you're already pretty much maxed out in upgrading your defenses already, and then you make it to the 2-hour mark, and you realize you haven't DONE anything since you switched to Endless. It's all just treading water, it's all just doing the same thing. It does have more depth than the average puddle, but it does not have as much depth as the average small creek. Overall: 6/10. Worth playing, I guess. Maybe worth buying if you really really like random vaguely tower-defensey games.
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Highly addictive collectible card tower defense game dripping with its own unique style. 10 hours later, I beat the game with multiple characters and conquered endless mode. At this point I feel I have seen 99% of what this game has to offer and its time to move on. + Beautiful original artwork and style. + Most of the music tracks are awesome. I really love the Dark Industrial Techno tracks specifically. + The game flows perfectly, in my 10 hours with it I was constantly unlocking new funny "emails", characters, and cards. + The menu "Desktop Screen" that you control between game runs is a cool original concept. + Loads of unique weapons to unlock and use, most have beautiful visuals and are fun to watch. + The actual upgrade system and the base structured game mechanics are well thought out. - Some of the musical tracks are a bit much to listen to. A game run usually lasts 45 minutes, so listening to industrial metal for 45 minutes + the sound effects of the game can be annoying on the headphones and cause ear fatigue after awhile. - There are no boss fights, which the game is sorely missing. - Needs more enemy variety. - There is an abundant of useless cards. I would say during endgame, 80% of the cards received are useless. - There could have been more of a story to each of the playable characters. The playable characters do not have "Endings", when beating the game, you just get a results screen. - Endless mode is way too easy if you make the right cards, I could have gone forever, literally. - Could benefit from a save system, perhaps after every 10 levels, and make the entire game longer. More levels in general, larger variety of enemies, boss fights etc. Overall Score: 8 / 10 Good but with a few tweaks could have been better! Sequel?
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A neat card based roguelike, although I wouldn't consider it groundbreaking. TLDR: If you're looking for thousands of hours of playtime, or a conventional tower defense game, you may want to skip this one. If you like rng heavy roguelikes, and deckbuilding from zero, you'll love this game. Introduction First off, the game is technically tower defense, but if you go into it expecting depth in that regard, then you are going to be disappointed. Heretics Fork is really a card game with tower defense going in the background. There is no positioning or enemy variance to speak of. All towers shoot from the middle, and all garrisons start from the middle. And the enemies are rather boring, with very little uniquity, aside from the occasional bosses, which just have loads more health. In true roguelike fashion, most of the core gameplay loop is rng and gambling. You start each level with a (mostly) predetermined strategy, based on the character you choose, and your starting towers. After that, just try to make the most of whatever good or bad situation the game gives you. The good The atmosphere is on point. You start a game on a desktop that really sells you the fact that you're working for a company in hell. You'll receive various helps, nudges, and simply annoying messages from a paperclip that doubles as your boss. There is also an email system, which (without spoiling anything) can give you some extra entertainment through ridiculous company wide messages, random spam, and bits related to the game's story. The soundtrack is amazing. My only feeling about it is that it's complete overkill, and I love this game for it. At least 100 tracks of dark synthwave, goa, and some hard rock/metal. Definitely something that I will enjoy outside of the game too. And since the game has a full desktop for you, you have full access to a music player, that allows you to skip and go back any time. You can even favorite tracks if not all of them are your cup of tea. The cards have a lot of variety, making sure that most random pulls and upgrades are interesting/exciting. I think they struck a nice balance where getting a good card is actually exciting, without feeling like you're repeatedly and hopelessly pulling the arm of slot machine. Well, *most of the time*. The characters that you can play with are quite interesting. Most of them are not straight upgrades, and their different abilities definitively affect you playstyle. The game's approach to different characters is also quite nice. You get enough choices in the beginning to interest you, but not enough to be overwhelming. However, you'll start unlocking variants later, which bumps up the total character count quite a bit. Variants retain the character's base defining ability, and adds a twist on top of it. Often simple, at times something that completely changes how you play the game. The bad Enemies are mostly boring. The only ones that stand out are the little buggers that accelerate near your tower, and that's about it. The rest are various levels of straight up meat shields. The bosses are just tankier blobs that try to reach your tower. The game mitigates this via different patterns the enemies approach in, but that novelty wears off quickly. There are a lot of gotchas in the wording of different game mechanics, and a few instances where the wording is simply ambiguous. There are major differences between power and item cards, and at no point does the game make this obvious. There is also a task that says "sacrifice 9 garrison cards". What do you mean sacrifice? You mean a card effect? You mean a character ability? You mean banish? (The last one is what it means). This seems like a nitpick, but clearly communicating what a card does and what the player has to do is vital in strategy and roguelike games. The amount of resources available for in-depth strategy is not great. This is a lesser known indie title, so it's not at all surprising. But you should be aware, if you have any questions beyond "How do I get this achievement", the only resource you'll have is steam discussions. I completed this game with 100% achievements, and I still don't know how damage is calculated. -_- The meh Balance could be better. Most shop cards are only useful on one character. Mixed garrison-tower builds are basically non-existent. Garrisons builds are often underpowered. Most of the strategy boils down to "this needs less cards, so less rng, so it's better". This isn't true in all cases, but most of the strategies that can clear torment 5 have this in common. There is a somewhat common issue with deck bloat. Remember when I said that this game has very few resources online? Well, if someone unlocks all the wrong cards (Good luck finding out what doing a task unlocks), it's entirely possible that that player will have a much harder time, because their card pool is bloated with a bunch of cards that are useless for any simple strategy. Around the middle of unlocking everything I did experience this, and with literally zero way of seeing what I should be doing (no info online or in-game, regarding what I should unlock) the game suddenly got a lot harder. Late-game has mitigation for this, but I think the devs should help out on making a lot of this info publicly available. Final words That's basically it. I think the devs truly made something unique. The game isn't perfect, but I think it's easy to love despite it's faults. This is likely not the type of game I'll pour hundreds of hours into, but I think it stands it's ground quite well. it took me 63~ hours to 100% the game, I suspect that for someone going in blind 40-80 hours of playtime is mostly realistic. Can't say I would play beyond that, but I also wouldn't be surprised if people did come back to do some runs once every few months.
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It's a very low-engagement, almost idle game variant of survivor's-likes. Rather than constantly move around, things come to you, and you passively kill them with different attacks, while accumulating power on a per-round basis. It's not great for if you're actually watching it, but it's very nice as a stimulating diversion with a solid selection of darksynth and metal tracks in the background. If you have two+ monitors, it's a good candidate for the side monitor.
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Last Updates| Steam data | 08 April 2025 22:03 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 12 April 2025 05:46 |
| Steam price | 15 April 2025 04:48 |
| Steam reviews | 14 April 2025 21:56 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about Heretic's Fork, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about Heretic's Fork
- SteamCharts - Analysis of Heretic's Fork concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck Heretic's Fork compatibility
Online players
60
Developer
9FingerGames
Publisher
Ravenage Games
Release
13 Sep 2023
Platforms
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