Cartapli is built on top of a really exciting premise: it’s a roguelike game that borrows from games like Slay the Spire and Into the Breach but comes to life on its own with its unique and innovative origami folding mechanic.
You’re a fighter on a piece of paper. Your goal is to defeat all the enemies on the same paper. The only way you can move is by grabbing the paper from somewhere on its edges and fold the paper. Characters and obstacles on the battlefield will move accordingly and the challenge comes from finding folds that position you in advantageous position. You only have one hit point and the paper resets to unfolded state if you get knocked out — until you run out of papers (lives).
Your character can have up to four pebbles that work similarly to Relics in Slay the Spire. They are permanent, passive bonuses that give you more attack or speed or attack range or some abilities that activate when hitting an enemy. I have seen a small collection of them through my early runs. They are quite simple and haven’t felt super impactful.
I immediately saw a strong similarity to Into the Breach in how the game is played. To protect yourself and to get through the fights faster, you need to make the enemies battle against each other. Since the folding lets you see everything that happens on the turn and in which order, there’s less cases where you draw yourself into an unwinnable corner though so it’s way kinder game than Into the Breach.
I bring up these two games not because I think it’s a lazy clone but more as a testament to how the game picks up some of the interesting bits from really good games and adds its own flair to make it feel like a game of its own.
At the time of writing, the game is available free-to-play in Steam and at least so far I haven’t run into any in-game microtransaction bullshit of freemium games so it seems to actually be a great game that’s provided for free.