Work an office job keeping sinners in hell via tower defense in Heretic's Fork

Among the shocking variety of roguelikes, deckbuilders, tower defenses, and deckbuilding roguelike tower defenses released in past years, recent release Heretic's Fork stands out for me because the menu screen has the aesthetics of like a prototype of Windows 95 or whatever. That's part of the game, too, because you get weird stuff that lives on your desktop and weird files to open and emails from your coworkers at your job where you keep "the endless hordes of the underworld in check."

Which honestly whips butt, and I love it.

Your job each outing is to pick one of several employees to act as "on-site manager" for your demonic tower which is also an escape vector from hell. Your job is to build up a deck of cards to deploy and empower towers and demonic garrisons that'll gun down/burn alive/explode those sinful souls from getting out of hell. It has decent build variety, and post-launch updates have immediately addressed my big dislikes from early plays—so I'm ready to recommend it if that sounds fun.

It's one of those games that I'm in for the vibes, though. I love that every time I finish an hour or so of tower defense (or lose in 20 minutes) I'm greeted by an email from some weirdo who works at DEUS VULT, INC about the latest HR complaint or faux pas involving an interaction between demonic and human employees. Or some weird coworker sends me a "digital egg" to incubate on my desktop. No way that's going wrong!

And I'm happy to keep playing to see that stuff. So far I've uncovered about five or six variations on how to build your towers and combinations, with a few cards not yet unlocked and challenges to complete, like using only a single damage type. It's not a Slay the Spire level of deck variation, nor are the deck ideas particularly brilliant, but the hook's there for me.

You can find Heretic's Fork for $10 US on Steam.

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.