Crown Trick is a somewhat interesting take on the turn-based roguelike. I saw a lot of potential in their unique mechanic, where both your basic attack weapon and your 4 skills, which cost mana, have an attack pattern. This pattern defines the tiles in relation to your own where the attack hits. The same is true for enemies, but their attacks are telegraphed by turn timers on the tiles where their attacks will hit. There's also an element system, with half a dozen different elements that apply different debuffs and interact with each other to create new effects. On top of that, enemies have armor that can be broken to stun them, make them vulnerable, and build a stacking combo.
You can find multiple permanent passive upgrades each floor, as well as new, potentially stronger, weapons. There's also a blink ability with limited charges, that lets you reposition yourself in a large area without taking a turn. Both the blink and the mana for casting your 4 skills (which can also be swapped out during the run) refill every time you enter a new room.
That's a long list of not-so-common things you can do in the game, and just from the list, it looks plenty interesting. The problem is that the developers stacked game mechanics without making their game really take advantage of them. Most weapons fall into one of three attack patterns, making the main difference between them be stats, or their passive ability, which tends to be uninteresting. I saw no weapons or abilities with interesting attack patterns, e.g. checkerboards or skipping tiles, only straight lines and rectangles. Enemy attacks tend to be on a 1-turn timer, which means its either trivial to sidestep them, or straight up impossible to dodge unless you use a blink charge. It would have been far more interesting to see multi-turn attacks that force movement in some direction, playing into other enemies or environmental hazards. And the armor break combo system is largely uninteresting for normal enemies as they're too easy, and pointless for bosses, as it's usually not possible to break their armor fast enough.
There's also some minor problems with the game being poorly translated, and some gameplay elements being a bit unclear, but they weren't significant compared to the problems listed above. Overall, I found the game got boring quite fast as there was not much new content in terms of neither game mechanics nor interesting variations on builds from run to run. It's a shame, because I really saw potential in the combination of mechanics, but they were heavily underutilized. So, I can't recommend Crown Trick. If you're looking for something slightly similar, Dungeons of Dredmor still holds up.
