What Card-en-Ciel Is
Card-en-Ciel is a roguelite card-battling RPG where you play as Neon, a self-professed detective known as the "Gaming Chair Detective" who specializes in crimes committed inside full-dive VR games. The story kicks off when an in-development game world is suddenly overrun by characters from other games, old and new, and Neon has to delve into virtual dungeons to stop them. Battles take place on a 6x3 playfield, giving you room to think about positioning and card placement rather than just playing cards in a line. The game leans into a retro, cyberpunk anime look with grid-based movement as you explore.
Building Your Deck
You collect from a pool of over 300 cards, each one featuring a unique character pulled from those invaded games. These characters come alive with full English and Japanese voice acting, talking with friends and foes and reacting during battle. Winning battles earns you new allies to add to your deck, so your options grow as you push toward the boss and advance the story. You can also recruit Muse cards: when you meet a Muse's conditions, she starts performing and activates a unique effect that can enable some very degenerate combos. Each Muse sings a different song styled after the era and genre of her original game, with 50 full vocal songs in total.
How a Group Plays Together
Card-en-Ciel supports real-time online head-to-head battles, so two people from your group can face off directly with the decks they've built. There are also daily and weekly dungeon challenges with online leaderboards, which give everyone a shared set of runs to compare scores on. Outside of those, the main experience is single-player: you freely roam dungeons, pick the enemies you fight, and work through the story at your own pace.
Before You Start
The game ships with full content on day one: over 10 story dungeons, each with different cards to collect, plus 10 extra difficulty levels that add new rule twists alongside stronger enemies. There are special "Grand Battle Dungeons" where you construct a specific deck to take on the challenge, over 50 random events featuring various game characters, and multiple endings to uncover. It's tagged as supporting controller play, and the PvE side is the bulk of the game, with PvP handled through the online battles.