Fogpiercer

Fogpiercer was provided by Hooded Horse for review. Thank You!

When I first heard of Fogpiercer, I couldn't help but wonder if it was related to the hit Snowpiercer franchise. Both are set in post-apocalyptic frozen wastelands, both heavily feature trains, and the similarities in the names are hard to miss, but no, they are not related, although I wouldn't be surprised if Fogpiercer was inspired by Snowpiercer.

Fogpiercer doesn't offer much as far as a story goes, much in a similar vein to games it was inspired by, such as FTL. There's a (very) short preamble before you start, and then that's pretty much it. The gameplay is very much the driving force behind the game, and fortunately, I enjoyed the deck-building and strategic gameplay of Fogpiercer immensely.

If "Puzzle Strategy" were a genre, then Fogpiercer would definitely be in it. Rather than just drawing cards and using them to directly attack your foes, there's a big selection of strategies that you can employ that are often far more effective than direct attacks. Artillery, for example, can push enemy units away from the explosion, putting them in potentially even more dangerous positions, or knock them into other enemies, dealing damage to both.

When an enemy is defeated, it also falls backwards through the grid, damaging the next enemy behind. All of this means that when you play your cards, you're taking a lot more into account than the straight damage value, you're looking at chain reactions and combos, can you take out several enemies in just one play, or can you put enemies into a certain position with one card, so your next card can unleash a devastating attack, it's incredibly satisfying when you do. There are also defensive cards you can play to protect your train, which are invaluable if you're facing large numbers of enemies.

Another layer of strategy is created by the carriages of your train. The carriages determine what cards you can have in your deck. For example, there is a protection carriage that allows you to add Shield cards to your deck; there is also a minigun carriage, a tesla coil one, an artillery one, etc. And the placement of these carriages on your train also matters.

The shield carriage, for example, has some cards that only work for adjacent carriages, so I tended to favor putting it as my first carriage, so it could shield my actual locomotive easily regardless of what card I drew. Cards drawn for offensive carriages also have firing arcs, such as artillery not being able to shoot nearby grid spaces, meaning you do want to take into account the composition of your train, with the game allowing you to have up to 5 carriages in a run.

As is common for games in the genre, you'll work through a map of nodes, with each node being an "encounter", which can be a battle, a shop, or another area of interest where you can often upgrade or acquire new cards/loot. With your goal to eventually reach the end of the map and pierce the "fog". At which point, you'll face a major boss and your run will restart, with the goal of the game to beat all of the main bosses by choosing different paths on your journey.

The progression in Fogpiercer, however, I found to be a rather weak point. You'll unlock new characters/carriages/cards by either completing specific objectives or spending the game's permanent currency that lasts between runs. It takes a long time to unlock everything; arguably, you'll still have locked items when you've essentially completed the game, depending on how quickly you're able to reach the conclusion.

The unlocks also don't change the game by a huge amount. Sure, the extra cards you can buy add a bit of variety, but they don't really feel like they're a huge improvement over the starting cards; they just offer you more choices, which can sometimes be a bad thing, as more cards mean the cards you really want will appear in your hand less often. The carriages, however, are the big unlocks, and they have a large impact on how you play the game. There are only a few to unlock, though, and they all have quite high requirements, meaning you'll only unlock one every few runs.

There are different environments you'll encounter in Fogpiercer, but really, there's only so much you can do with a post-apocalyptic snowy wasteland, and the environments don't really make the game feel any fresher. The main changes will come in the form of new enemy types appearing, bringing with them new attacks that you'll need to figure out how to defend against and counter. It helps keep the gameplay interesting; you'll just need to get used to similar visuals throughout.

On the plus side of the game's presentation, the music is great, and I'm a big fan of the slightly electronic feel to the soundtrack as your train blasts through the wasteland, taking out bandits along the way.

Fogpiercer - Steam Deck Performance

Fogpiercer runs great on the Steam Deck from the off. It supports 1280x800 as a resolution, has full controller support, and has a decent-sized UI with readable text.

As for performance, the game defaults to settings that work well on the Steam Deck. I would recommend just changing 2 things. For me, the frame limit was set to 144; I adjusted this to 60. I also changed the Render Scale from 70% to 100%; it has a minimal impact on GPU usage and helps clear up the edges of objects nicely. I opted out of employing any form of AA. TAA makes the game look way too blurry, and MSAA isn't worth the performance cost. The only thing we miss out on is Shadows, which look bad unless they're on the highest setting, which really hammers the Steam Deck's GPU.

With these settings, expect a stable 60 FPS throughout. I didn't really notice any drops, except slight ones during transitional phases in the game, such as loading a scene.

As for power draw, with the right settings, Fogpiercer is light on battery, drawing just 10-11W. This gives us a nice battery life of around 4.5 hours on a Steam Deck OLED and around 3.5 hours on a Steam Deck LCD. Temperatures were around 50C-55C.

Accessibility:

Fogpiercer has plenty of accessibility options; all dialogue is subtitled, and you can adjust the intensity of camera shake, as well as camera movement, to help with motion sickness. You can even enable "God Mode" to make your train invincible, if you really want to.

There are also options to adjust the colors of certain UI elements to help distinguish them if you have a form of color blindness. Controls can be rebound.

Conclusion:

Fogpiercer offers a unique take on the deck-building roguelite genre, with a focus on understanding how your cards can be used together against a challenging but fair array of enemies. Progression is limited, and the storyline is close to non-existent, but the gameplay is its saving grace.

Fogpiercer also runs great on the Steam Deck. You can up the render scale a little to improve the overall image quality, but off the bat, the controls, performance, and presentation of the game are good to go on the Steam Deck, earning it a Best on Deck rating.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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