Burn With Me Review – Facing The Inner Demons

I’m a big fan of deckbuilding and card games, and their various subgenres, from roguelite to tactical strategy games. But I’m often skeptical of story-driven card games, since I’ve rarely seen the narrative integrated well into the deckbuilding genre’s gameplay structure. Nevertheless, Burn With Me, with its Lovecraftian atmosphere and unsettling art style, seemed too much for me to pass on.

Burn With Me, developed by Nozomu Games and published by Inner Pocket, is a narrative-focused deckbuiler about summoning and battling your inner demons in an occult Lovecraftian academy. It has a dark and engaging story and manages to tie it in with interesting gameplay mechanics, culminating in a memorable and challenging final chapter.

We play as a professor of the occult academy, teaching a class about energy balancing. It’s a boring topic, and we notice our students falling asleep, so we change the topic and talk about a summoning ritual. The students are enthralled now, taking fervent notes and learning every step of the ritual to the best of their abilities. After class, one of the students still has some questions, so we set up a summoning circle and help him to summon his inner demon.

The summoning circle has five circles, and we have to play cards to reach a certain power each round. The way cards interact with each other depends on their power level and their positioning. Each round, we get to choose one of three cards to add to our deck, building out a synergistic deck that gets more powerful as the required power rises with each round. When we surpass the required score, we fill our sanity bar, and then we can spend it on future rounds if we are a few points short. The core gameplay is simple and easy to learn, but the game is challenging enough, and we need to think strategically when choosing new cards and where to place them. When we finish a chapter, we also unlock the hard mode for that chapter so we can try a greater difficulty and craft better decks and synergies to overcome the required power.

After finishing the first chapter, the student gives us their “bleeding heart”. It’s mostly metaphorical, but there are some gruesome art pieces that go with the dark theme of Burn With Me. More students approach us to summon their own inner demons, and by helping them and getting their bleeding hearts, we slowly learn about the protagonist’s past and prepare for his own summoning ritual at the end of the game.

Each of the students has their own unique deck of cards and mechanics that correlate with their inner demons. For example, one of their inner demons is gambling, and in that chapter, there are a lot of chance-based mechanics. Another inner demon is control, so in that chapter, instead of getting above the required power limit, we have to get the exact number or as close to it as possible. This was one of the best iterations of implementing story in a card game I have ever seen. The narrative and gameplay follow a similar path throughout and share similar themes in a tangible and engaging way.

Burn With Me completes its fantastic presentation with a dark and bitter art style that enhances the atmosphere, and a chilling but strong voice narration that helps deliver the story. One of the best aspects of the game’s visual design is the demonic hand suspended on the right side of the screen, dealing us the cards. I later learned they used motion capture to make the animations look more realistic. The fluid and real feeling of the hand might seem a bit out of place, but I do think it adds to the overall creepy feeling of Burn With Me.

The game is on the shorter side, lasting about two to three hours, maybe a couple more if you decide to finish every chapter on the hard mode. There are also some alternative card arts that you can unlock by playing more. It’s a fun and memorable experience, and my only real complaint is that there was so little of it. The hard mode is a nice extra challenge, but I’m left craving more narrative deckbuilding gameplay, and I want to know more about this Lovecraftian universe and its characters. However, my wanting more of the game is another compliment to how well-made and compact it is. If you don’t mind the short playtime and are a fan of deckbuilders, I can’t recommend Burn With Me enough.

Nima reviewed Burn With Me on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing, and our score will not be changed.