Menace from the Deep – Cthulhu on the maps

A Ukrainian-language Roguelike based on Lovecraft's mythology? We need it.

Menace from the Deep is often compared to Slay the Spire, and Artem Bazdyrev, the game's sole developer, was once a fan of Mega Crit's creation, as he stated in an interview with Mezha. Unfortunately, I can't personally confirm the similarities between the two projects, as I stopped being interested in bagels a long time ago and have never played Slay the Spire. In fact, I would have ignored Menace from the Deep as well, if not for one... two "buts".

Firstly, I wanted to support a Ukrainian indie project whose author took care of the game's Ukrainian voice acting. Secondly, I'm a big fan of Lovecraft in all its manifestations and have spent dozens of hours playing themed board games like Arkham Horror, Ancient Horror, or Cthulhu: Death Can Die.

I especially liked the LCG (Living Card Games) Arkham Horror. The card game is a multi-part adventure with characters who fight monsters, move around locations, determine the outcome of random events, and move forward in the story with cards from various decks. Hmm, sounds similar, doesn't it? So I don't know about Slay the Spire, but Menace from the Deep, as practice has shown, fits into the tabletop Lovecraftian vibe one hundred percent.

It all starts when the mysterious Butterfly Society appears in Innsmouth, turning the local abandoned museum into its headquarters and starting to investigate the strange events that have been happening in and around the city lately. Cultists, ancient monoliths, people losing their minds, dark rituals, a blood moon, you name it.

Since the museum is in a shameful state, and the exhibits of artifacts (or relics, as they are called here) that could be useful in the fight against the ancient evil have been depleted, the Butterfly agents have to collect not only information but also resources to rebuild the museum's premises, which opens up new opportunities.

The raids themselves follow the same scenario - to reach the boss of each of the three acts, the player needs to play a certain number of cards from the travel decks, thus activating one of many possible events - a fight with locals or otherworldly monsters, a chance encounter, a visit to a museum where you can get relics or a warehouse where you buy (or steal) building materials, a motel stop to heal or improve the cards in the player's deck, and so on.

You always see the first card in each deck, and over time, you get the opportunity to look deeper, so you can plan your route to the boss. And this is important not only because proper planning allows you to balance between fighting and restoring lost health and sanity. For the first few hours, you need to pay extra attention to making sure that your car doesn't run out of gas, which is spent on actually drawing cards from the travel deck. At first, my character died on the bosses, perhaps less often than just because he couldn't keep moving.

The battle is fought using cards that allow you to attack yourself, block enemy attacks, cast effects, and use skills. The scheme, I think, is familiar to many - we take a starting hand and play as many cards as our energy allows. By default, we have three points of energy, while the price of cards varies from 0 to 3. Then it's the turn of the satellites, if any, and then the opponents.

The next actions of both enemies and satellites are specified in advance, so you need to take this into account, but you cannot control the actions of satellites, although it would be nice to be able to redirect their attacks manually, without imposing the "focus" status, because sometimes there are situations when the enemy could be killed, and your pack of rats decided to dig in or start biting a perfectly healthy enemy.

In addition to cards, active skills and one-time consumables, as well as passive relics and equipment that your character carries with him, can help. Moreover, skills can be activated as many times as you want to have enough insight points, and consumables can also be used all at once.

The game offers three classes of heroes to choose from: a private detective focused primarily on firearms and hand-to-hand combat, a professor who uses the forces of the elements, alchemy, and summoning animal allies, and a cultist with blood magic and knives, lots and lots of knives.

However, no matter who you choose, the first races will look rather bland: the heroes have a small arsenal, no good cards, no various bonuses, monsters hurt, die for a long time, there is a constant lack of gasoline, and you have to choose between regaining strength, getting additional items and resources, or fighting again to upgrade your cards.

At first glance, the choice is not an easy one - yes, with each use, the cards gain experience points and eventually you have the opportunity to improve them, which can potentially make life easier further within this particular race. On the other hand, what good are powerful cards if your hero is about to die from a loss of health or sanity? But the fact is that at least in the first half of the game, neither of these things really matters, because Menace from the Deep is a roguelite, or was at the time of its release.

Unlike roguelike games, where all possible content is available within one session, roguelite games use a slightly different scheme - here you start with a very limited arsenal and gradually, from session to session, discover new features and mechanics that allow you to advance further.

Yes, it will be difficult at first, but over time, new decks with more interesting strategies will become available instead of the banal "aggressive" and "defense" strategies, new cards will be added to travel decks and fuel, resting places, merchants, and museums will become much more common. More powerful cards will be dropped as a reward for defeating monsters, relics will allow you to open a battle by imposing several negative effects on enemies at once and heal during the fight, and consumables will become more useful.

In fact, some roguelite players dislike this approach, because it seems that the game artificially limits their capabilities, "feeding" game mechanics little by little, thus stretching the gameplay. The same criticism was voiced about Menace from the Deep.

Well, Mr. Artem heard you, and after the latest update, the game has a pure roguelike mode called "Custom Game" with the ability to customize the parameters for yourself - difficulty, number of enemies, length of acts, the ability to mix cards of all heroes in one deck, activation of all bonuses from construction, endless fuel, and even the ability to enable Cthulhu as the final boss. You see, he was not designed to be killed in one go, his mechanics involve eating the "ancient" piece by piece, so hardcore fans will be in for a worthy challenge.

However, I would still advise switching to this mode after the campaign is over.

It's good in itself, although the characters, in my opinion, lack a bit of depth (however, like many of the characters in the original works that formed the basis of this setting, let's be honest), the plot also has some rough edges, Personally, I would have liked to see a closer connection between the purely gameplay segments and the story episodes in the museum, but, anyway, the plot is present, it is quite interesting, even an unexpected raft-twist. And most importantly, it has full-fledged Ukrainian voice acting, which is still extremely rare even in games with a much bigger budget.

In general, Menace from the Deep made a very positive impression on me - my favorite setting, the ability to play in short sessions, nice pictures and soundtrack, just what you need to keep yourself busy in a free half hour.

I played mostly on Steam Deck and would like to note two things. First of all, the game is very energy efficient, the consumption almost never exceeded 7 watts, so you can count on 6-7 hours of continuous play during outages, which is a definite plus (the game is also energy efficient on PC, adding no more than 5-10% to the consumption on Windows - ed.) The downside is that the text, which is a lot in the game, is not adapted to the small screen at all, and at first my eyes got very tired. Hardcore fans of the genre may have their own complaints about certain mechanics, but I have no particular complaints and am looking forward to the new hero and the fourth act, which may be released next year.