Heretic's Fork

Heretic's Fork puts you in charge of Hell's HR department, drafting demonic employees and building towers out of cards instead of a fixed tech tree. Every run means picking from a shifting pool of towers, garrisons, and passive cards, then watching your layout hold or break against waves of the damned. The premise sounds like a joke, and the deckbuilder-tower-defense hybrid underneath plays it straight, card draft and all.

Nine-plus employees, each with a distinct card pool, give the draft real variety, and the pixel art carries a soundtrack from Occams Laser that reviewers singled out as one of the game's strongest elements. The Hell's-middle-management framing runs through the writing and a Clippy-style assistant character, and more than one review credited the game with teaching three genres' worth of mechanics, deckbuilding, tower defense, and roguelite runs, without losing new players along the way.

The trouble starts once the drafts stop cooperating. Steam's discussion boards run a long, still-active thread on card balance: the Sin Spotter tower and Unholy-damage builds dominate to the point that some cards, like the Fallen Crusaders garrison, get called irredeemably weak by the players who tested them. A GameGrin review knocked the game to a 6 out of 10 over a related issue: towers and garrisons run themselves once placed, so a run mostly means picking upgrades and watching the wave clear. Add a slow, grindy opening stretch, a weak starting employee, thin early income, and a strategic ceiling that tops out around DPS optimization, and the back half of the game has less to offer than the first few runs promised.

Across roughly 4,100 reviews, Steam rates it Very Positive at 85 percent, a number that's held steady since its 2023 launch, though the newest batch of reviews is too small a sample to read much into. Critic coverage stayed thin: GameGrin's 6 sits well below Checkpoint Gaming's 8 and SUPERJUMP's 9.5, and neither Metacritic nor OpenCritic pulled together enough reviews to generate a real aggregate score.

Buy it. The premise and the presentation earn the price of admission on their own, but don't expect the back half to open up new tricks past your first dozen runs.