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.
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