STARDUST: Wish of the Witch review: a card SRPG that began in a barracks notebook

We were not paid for this review, and the studio did not give us the game.

Anyone who loved turn-based strategy knows the particular silence it makes. Your turn comes, you weigh stepping one more tile forward, you step, you eat a counter, and you regret it. STARDUST: Wish of the Witch leaves that silence exactly where it was and puts a deck of cards in your hand instead.

Torn from a notebook in basic training

The two people who founded Kniv Studio met in basic training. With nothing to do, they tore pages out of the notebooks the army issued them and built a card game, which grew into a prototype they called Nonsan Tactics. The promise to turn it into a real game once they were out is where the studio started, they said in an interview.

They did found the studio once they were out, and those notebook cards became the combat system of this game. That the first thing they ever made was a card game explains everything that follows.

The deck changes the turn

The skeleton is the SRPG you already know. You move on a grid, you attack, you take counters, you wait for the next turn. What changed is how you choose an attack.

Every card carries its own cost and cooldown. Spend a heavy skill and the next two turns go quiet; string cheap cards together and a combo lands. So the deck you built before the fight decides, in advance, whether the battlefield opens up or closes in around you.

The counter rule sits on top of that. Step one more tile and you strike first, but you also walk into counter range. Hold a card back and the next turn is easier, but the opening you passed on does not come again. The director said in an interview that if a card action was not countered, it felt right to reward the player, and that thought led him to fighting-game combos.

The deck is set before the battle starts. What you do on the field is work out how to run it.

The town buildings are about the deck too. The cafe hands out temporary buffs, the forge makes artifacts that move your stats, and the observatory draws variant cards with different power and cost. Pull a good one and the script for your next battle changes completely.

Why it won

The game was named a winner in the indie category of Korea's Game of the Year awards. The prize is run by the Ministry of Culture with Electronic Times and The Games Daily, and administered by the Korea Creative Content Agency.

Strip the awards language away and something still stands. This is a tactics RPG of about twenty-five hours with a full Korean voice track for the main story, shipped in nine languages. Steam user reviews sit at Very Positive, and the recent score is higher than the all-time score. They kept working on it after release.

What it meant then

Korean reviewers looked at this game and thought of Farland Tactics. The director named Farland Saga 2 as his largest influence. If you spent the nineties inside that kind of game, you will recognise the screen on sight. Whole sprites move, dialogue rolls, and there is time to measure a single tile.

Most of us never saw the end of those games. School started, the computer lived in the living room, and one day the save file was gone. This is the kind of game that lets you finally see that ending.

Playing it now

The good part is clear. Cards, counters and combos interlock, so every turn hands you something to choose, and full sprite animation carries the board. A full Korean voice track is not a common choice at this size.

The weak parts belong here too. Maps run wide enough that some turns are spent only walking, and the roster leans toward characters who deal direct damage. There is not much to do outside combat. Reviewers also noted that key bindings cannot be changed and that some town shortcuts do not respond. The tactical thinking is concentrated in the late, harder stages.

If you want an RPG with a lot to do between fights, this is not it. What this game does well is one battlefield at a time, and everything else is the road to the next one. That one battlefield, though, gives back the exact minute you used to spend deciding whether to step one tile forward.