Griftlands

Griftlands is a roguelike deckbuilder that's currently just barely in the top 1000 highest rated games on Steam. You can play with one of three characters, each with slightly different cards and playstyles, but overall still following the same rules. Each character also has a different campaign, completing which is the goal of the game. A campaign is divided into a few days over which you must complete various tasks. The tasks have some variety and are drawn from a random pool of tasks that are appropriate for the current situation, but there are also always tasks that form the main storyline. Still, depending on your decisions, you can shape which characters you encounter, which tasks they give you, and to a degree what kind of ending you get. The roleplay aspect is very strong in this game, as you encounter a ton of characters each run, and none are randomly generated. Each character has a role in the world, and can be encountered in appropriate places. There's a fair bit of overlap, so you couldn't break the game by killing off key characters, but it's still very cool to see how your past decisions can come back to haunt you because you now need to deal with someone you screwed over in the past.
The deckbuilder part of the game is divided into two parts - negotiation and combat. While a sufficient quantity of violence will usually solve all problems, it also carries much greater reprecussions. Going around killing everyone generally doesn't earn you a good reputation and will make your future endeavors more difficult. On the other hand, negotiation doesn't work with everyone, but if successfully executed can often get you out of situations without upsetting anyone. Combat is a more familiar experience. You have action points, you play cards, choose a target, deal damage, maybe defend yourself, or spend tempo building up buffs. Negotiations on the other hand are not a system I've seen before. You still have action points and cards, but now you instead attack your opponents arguments and defend your own. You win by defeating their core argument (or lose by losing your own), but can also choose to spend time attacking thier other arguments instead, which are essentially buffs. Both game modes also have limited-use items that can be in your deck, passive augments that buff you in some way, and of course their own separate deck with cards that can be levelled up. The games modes are completely separated in power, and playing a mode makes you stronger in that mode. So you have to be careful to not focus too hard on only one thing.

There is also meta-progression. Completing a campaign, win or lose, unlocks new cards, and gets you points to buy passive upgrades for that character, and beating a campaign unlocks the next difficulty level of said campaign. It also unlocks a "Brawl Mode", which is kind of like the campaign, but without the story. I don't really understand the point of that, since I thought it was like a survival mode game or something to see how far you can push yourself, but it's still the same format - divided into days with a bigger fight at the end of each day, and choice missions during the day, just without the roleplay elements. I would recommend always playing the campaign, not this mode.
But seeing this meta-progression was also where problems started to arise. See, the game was really fun for the first playthrough, if a bit easy. But okay, you unlock the next difficulty if you beat the campaign. It only takes a few hours. But you also get better at the game. And then you have a choice. Do the same campaign again with a harder difficulty, or play the next one? I can guarantee, now that you know how to play, the next campaign will be even easier, since you start that at the first difficulty level. But if you decide to repeat the same campaign, then not only are you missing out on new content, but now you learn how to build even stronger decks, making the next campaign even more easy and boring when you do decide to go back to it. And sure, a single campaign run is only a few hours, but if you complete all three on the first 3 difficulty levels, you could be 40-50 hours into the game without the game ever having presented a challenge to you.

The game is well made and enjoyable, and despite everything, I still put it on my favorite games of all time list, but rather low on that list. I played for a few dozen hours, and not once in that time did the game really challenge me, and by the end of it, doing the same campaign again had become a bit monotone, as many events started to repeat. Sure, new difficulty levels were noticably more challenging, and I'm sure I could have gotten to difficult content in that time had I put all those hours into a single campaign, but then I wouldn't have experienced two thirds of the game's story. I'm also not sure that this dual-deck approach is the best way to go about things, as it doesn't feel too great to be absolutely crushing enemies in one game mode and then become an incompetent mess in another. Practically though, it was rather low on my list of irritations.
I've yet to play some of the more renowned roguelike deckbuilders, but I can still confidently say that Griftlands deserves its spot up there, and I would recommend it to any fans of the genre.