None Shall Intrude - ★☆☆☆☆
There are a significant number of parallels between None Shall Intrude and Few Nights More. Both are published by Grab the Games, both are developed by Aeterna Ludi, and both were released within a day of one another. IndieLoupe knew that the games shared a publisher when we picked them up for review, but I have to admit that we only noticed further down the line that they were also created by the same developer. If a developer dropping two games one day after the other rings alarm bells for you, there might well be a good reason for that. There’s a few other similarities too, and I’ll get into those in the reviews, but given the above, it seemed appropriate that the games were also reviewed together.
We recommend reading this one first, but our review for Few Nights More can be found here.
Image: Aeterna Ludi / IndieLoupe
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Developer: Aeterna Ludi
Publisher: Grab the Games
Release: 21 January 2025
Retail Price (Steam): 14,79€/$14.99/£12.79
Playtime upon Review: 5.9 hours
None Shall Intrude is a roguelite card battler where you play as a dragon who manipulates the elements to take down waves of enemies. It starts, perhaps unsurprisingly, with a tutorial to teach you the mechanics of the game. What is surprising, then, is that the tutorial breaks instantly. Not within a few turns, and not from the player doing anything unusual, but upon the very first action the player is told to complete. After playing your first card, the little tutorial-whelpling tells you to “notice how the normal tile changed into a charred tile.” Except, it hasn’t. It asks you to play a second card on the apparently-charred tile, and you do. From that point on, the tutorial is stuck, unable to progress without skipping the mission entirely.
“While it’s difficult to set the bugs to one side, if you attempt to do so, the game still feels unbalanced and unfinished.”
I’m not saying one bug is enough to condemn a game, but something finding its way into a release build when it should have been noticed five minutes into playtesting is concerning. I attempted the tutorial on two different devices, just in case, and the results were identical.
It’s the first in a slew of bugs that, to put it bluntly, ruin the experience. When you build a strategy around a card that should cost zero, and its cost is repeatedly set to 52, or 36, or 48, it’s not fun. There’s bugs where you draw duplicates of cards which you only own one of, fights that don’t end when you’ve defeated all the enemies, and a wealth of smaller glitches that constantly interrupt the flow of the game. That is to name a few, even after three days of hotfixes and a 24-hour release delay. Evidently, a much more significant delay was needed to get this game release-ready.
While it’s difficult to set the bugs to one side, if you attempt to do so, the game still feels unbalanced and unfinished. The lacklustre plot threads have no real conclusion, being picked up and dropped at a whim, and are outright weird in some places. Why does the final boss - a character who appears from nowhere - need to have two nude, unconscious succubi tied to a dungeon wall? I think it’s pretty clear what the implication is. Does that pass for character building? Does it make him more, for want of a better word, badass? Was bathing in blood and killing the king not enough? It feels like we’re meant to think he’s cool, and as we all know, nothing says cool like keeping prisoners for… that. Perhaps I’m missing the mark with what the developer was going for - I’d be interested to know - but either way, it comes out of nowhere and just seems so unnecessary.
To try and get back to the gameplay: he’s also not very difficult to defeat. Not much is. It’s incredibly easy to pick up a synergistic build that just rolls over everything without much thought, such that when you have the option to get a new card, you typically pass it up to maintain deck quality. In what appears to be a symptom of Aeterna Ludi’s games, there’s a huge amount of bloat masquerading as content. From what I could tell, neither game has a compendium, but both are chock-full of unlocks and mechanics that are useless, imbalanced, or incomplete. It feels like the developer thinks of a neat idea for their game, throws it in, and then moves onto the next one before finishing it or fleshing it out. In None Shall Intrude, you can pick your dragon colour, except your dragon always looks the same - I’m apparently a Golden Dragon in the screenshot above. You can deck out your dragon’s lair, except it doesn’t do anything. In both games, it’s either difficult or impossible for players to actually find out what some mechanics do, or how things are supposed to work.
The most frustrating thing is that it feels like there was once potential in None Shall Intrude, but that it needed care and attention that the developer doesn’t seem to want to give it. In its current state, it’s so far from a complete game that I’d barely consider it worthy of early-access - it is by no means a release-worthy game. None Shall Intrude is awarded ★☆☆☆☆ by IndieLoupe.com.
The reviewed product was provided by the publisher.
