Burn With Me Preview — A Cozy Horror Game About Demons and Card Rituals

In Burn With Me, university students studying the arcane arts have to master not just ordinary subjects, but dark rituals as well. This card-based roguelike combines a scoring system reminiscent of Balatro with deckbuilding mechanics and narrative elements, and you'll play as talking animals ready to summon imps and demons to fulfill their most secret wishes.

At the start of the story, a professor introduces the students to the ritual of summoning a personal demon — a creature capable of granting its master's most cherished wish. The catch is, the result rarely turns out the way the summoner imagined.

The first chapter follows Alan. He has a demonic arm and wants his normal body back. During his studies, it turns out Alan is a natural-born occultist: knowledge comes easily to him, and he quickly masters the rituals. By the end of the chapter, Alan summons a demon and gets what he wished for — his body outwardly looks normal again. But it's only an illusion: if you look at him from a certain angle, for a split second you can see that his body has fully turned demonic.

Six chapters are promised in total. Even from the first one, it's clear what theme the developers plan to keep exploring: getting your wish granted can turn out to be nothing like what the summoner expected.

The core gameplay revolves around a five-card pentagram: each round, you need to reach a certain point total. In terms of scoring, the game resembles the already-mentioned Balatro, though the cards themselves work differently. Each one has its own stats and effects: some interact with neighboring cards, others directly change the point total or affect the cards in your hand. That makes Burn With Me feel closer to a deckbuilder with several possible strategies (if you're into roguelikes in general, check out our list of the 35 best roguelike games).

You have to build your deck as you go. At the start of each round, the game randomly offers three cards, and you pick one. It joins your deck once the round ends. Each chapter starts with a base set, and from there you gradually shape your deck around whatever strategy emerges as you play. This is where the first noticeable bit of randomness kicks in: the card you actually need might simply not be among the three offered (if you enjoy games with unusual mechanic combinations, also check out our Trainwatch preview).

The mechanic that gives the game its name is tied to drawing cards. To draw a new card, you have to burn one already in your hand — after that, it's gone for good. Some cards gain extra effects when burned, so destroying them can actually work in your favor, but the draw itself picks a card at random. On its own, this system works fine, but on high difficulty the randomness starts stacking up from several sources at once and has a much bigger impact on the outcome.

Each chapter runs 12–14 rounds, with a checkpoint roughly halfway through. If you lose, the game sends you back to it — or to the start of the chapter if you haven't reached it yet. On high difficulty you need to score more points, and that's exactly when these factors start to matter a lot: the cards offered for your deck, your starting hand, and the random card you're forced to burn when drawing. On normal difficulty, none of this gets in the way much — you can usually hit the required score even with a few mistakes.

Partially offsetting a bad round is the sanity mechanic — a glass heart in the bottom-right corner of the screen. As you rack up sanity points, it fills with blue energy. For every three points scored above the required threshold, you get one sanity point: for example, a result of 18/15 earns you one point. You can bank up to ten of them. This mechanic doesn't erase bad rounds, but it bailed me out more than once when I was dealt an unlucky hand.

The chapters differ not just in story, but in the set of available cards. The first focuses mainly on cards interacting with their neighbors. The second introduces cards that can steal other cards' stats and cancel their effects. In the third, the burn mechanic becomes a full part of the strategy: for example, a phoenix comes back next round with increased power after being burned.

Finishing the whole story on normal difficulty took a couple of hours, and replaying one chapter on high difficulty took roughly as long again (if you're into short, grim stories for one evening, check out our 37 best short horror games).

The most noticeable blend of hand-drawn art and live-action footage shows up in the animated hand that accompanies almost every action you take. Got a new card, drew one from the deck, or earned a sanity point — the hand reacts with its own gesture each time. You can also click it yourself; it was clearly filmed with a real hand, then stylized to match the game's overall hand-drawn look. The result is an odd little detail that really underlines Burn With Me's strange atmosphere.

The game's atmosphere could be described as "cozy dread." Demons, occultism, and grim rituals are all here, but they're used more to build an unusual setting than to actually scare or disgust you. Story scenes are voiced, and jazz plays outside the dialogue. That said, none of the music stuck with me after finishing the game.

Burn With Me launches on PC on October 12. It has already earned approval from Daniel Mullins, the creator of Inscryption: his verdict was short — enjoyed it a lot! The first chapter is available for free as a demo, so you can form your own impression even before launch.

In the end, Burn With Me comes across as a small card-based roguelike for a couple of evenings, betting less on depth and more on its unusual mix of mechanics, atmosphere, and story. On standard difficulty, the game left me with a pleasant impression, though on high difficulty several sources of randomness already weigh too heavily on the outcome. If you like compact roguelike deckbuilders you can finish in an evening or two, the demo is definitely worth trying. And maybe, later, the full game too.