RPG card game Shadowhand adds an easy mode in first major post-release patch

Shadowhand is an RPG card game with bags of ambition, but is "sorely in need of some tweaking", Pip wrote in her review earlier this month. Well, developer Grey Alien Games is trying to do just that in an update that focuses on balancing the difficulty and providing a bit more guidance to players that are struggling to get to grips with the Solitaire-style combat.

A new Relaxed Mode pits you against easier enemies and hands you more gold if you win. You can skip any duels that you lose and you'll still receive the enemy loot, too.

On all difficulty levels, specific fights—especially in chapter 8—have been made easier, and your active abilities now recharge by 50% when you retry a hand or a duel. And hard mode is now called 'very hard', "because that's what it is".

There's a deck's worth of bug fixes and a few tweaks that should make the game more pleasant to play: your inventory screen will now warn you if you have an empty active or passive ability slot as well as an unused card of the correct type, for example. The full change log is here.

Again, Pip's review is a good place to start if you want to know whether this game is for you. It might appeal to fans of Regency Solitaire, one of the developer's previous games.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.