High five!
Burn With Me is a hand-drawn game in which the most prominent non-hand-drawn bit is artist Eva Manuilovich's own right hand. Excellent, no notes. Manuilovich's hand appears on the right throughout each match ritual, dealing cards with a flick of the index finger; when you beat the target score, it gives you a thumbs-up, then reaches languidly towards the card you've won.
The game itself is quite a swish and entertaining card puzzler/battler, going by a quick bash at the demo. It casts you as a series of occult university students, carrying out forbidden sorcery under the eye of a lupine lecturer who is definitely going to get hauled before the PTA, one of these Halloweens. Each level consists of a pentagram. You have to place five creature cards around that pentagram to fill a vial with spiritual energy.
Each card has a base points value, but of course, you'll get nowhere through base points alone. You'll also need to exploit modifiers, beginning with simple adjacency effects: this Ursus card gets a boost if plonked down next to exactly one other card. By contrast, this froggo card gets a boost if it has no neighbours when played, so make sure you play it first.
The possibilities stack up quickly in the demo: I soon had a pufferfish card that inflated and deflated, every time I played it, with its value increasing and decreasing accordingly. I used the pufferfish to win myself an octopus that permanently raised the value of adjacent cards.
It's wise to play your best cards early in the rite, so that you can effectively make use of Burn With Me's headline conceit – the ability to draw a random new card by incinerating a random card in your hand. There's also a sanity vial that allows you to store any excess points from a win, granting you a reserve. All told, while I'm not sure this is a build-crafter on par with Balatro – Steam reviews suggest it'll last you around 6-8 hours or so - it has some decent chemistry. And unlike Balatro, it has a story. Each chapter is a dredging of a particular student's soul, laying bare their sinful desires over around a dozen battles.
Read more on Steam. I do suspect this might leave me wanting a little bit more, but it's nice to get hold of a deckbuilder that doesn't wish to become a lifelong habit. Truly, there is no demon more possessive than a deckbuilder with its eye on audience retention. Anyway, if you like hands and occultism, you should also check out Lucid Blocks.