Most games that send you to Hell put you there as a punishment. Heretic’s Fork puts you there as an employee.
You’re not the one trying to escape. You’re the one stopping everyone else from doing it, using a piece of infernal software that hires demons, builds towers out of cards, and turns keeping sinners in their place into a full-blown deckbuilding job.
Your New Job Is Keeping Sinners in Hell
A rift has opened between Hell and Earth, and sinners are pouring toward it. Your task, as laid out by the game’s suspiciously chipper onboarding system, is to stop them. You do that by hiring a demon, building out a card-based tower along a lane, and watching wave after wave of escapees run straight into it.
Each turn hands you four cards to work with, and every card costs energy to play, usually two or three points’ worth. That sounds simple until the waves start stacking up and you can’t afford to play everything in your hand, which forces you to actually think about what your tower needs most right now rather than just dumping your best cards on the board.
The presentation leans hard into the bit, too. The game runs like a corrupted desktop interface, complete with an unsettling little mascot walking you through your first shift like a demonic version of Clippy. Most of the story comes through stray emails and notes rather than any real exposition, and the game seems perfectly happy leaving you to piece together why exactly Hell needs a computer system to manage its overflow problem.
Towers, Garrisons, and Three Flavors of Damage
Your offense splits into two categories. Towers fire projectiles at anything in range, while garrisons send out demonic minions at set intervals to fight sinners directly. Between the two, you’ve got a decent amount of control over how your defenses actually behave, rather than just placing turrets and hoping for the best.
Damage comes in three styles, Hellfire, Holy, and Unholy, and different cards push your build toward leaning on one over the others. That matters more than it sounds like it should, since certain sinners are considerably more vulnerable to one damage type than another, and figuring that out mid-run is part of the fun.
There’s also a mid-run crafting system worth calling out. Pair up two cards of the same rarity and you’ll get to choose one of three upgraded versions in return, which gives you a real say in how your deck evolves instead of just hoping the right upgrade drops on its own.
A Debut With Serious Staying Power
Heretic’s Fork comes from Ravenage, and it’s held up well since its original 2023 release. What started as a Windows-only Early Access title has since made its way to PS4, PS5, Xbox, and Switch, which is a pretty good sign for a smaller roguelite that could easily have faded after launch instead of building out a following across platforms.
The combination here is the real draw. Tower defense gives you something to build, deckbuilding gives you real decisions to make between waves, and the whole thing is wrapped in a premise that’s funny without undercutting the strategy underneath it. It currently sits at a Mostly Positive rating on Steam, making it an easy one to justify picking up.
If you like your roguelites with a side of dark office comedy and just enough chaos to keep you honest, Heretic’s Fork is worth clocking in for.around a fairly focused idea. Build your deck, improve your defences, survive the waves and see how long you can keep Hell’s escapees where they belong.
Yet between the deckbuilding, tower defense and bullet heaven elements, there’s enough going on to keep you thinking about what you want to try next.
It’s also exactly the sort of game I can imagine opening with the intention of playing for twenty minutes, only to look at the clock later and wonder where the evening went.
If you’ve been working your way through the bigger names in the roguelite genre and fancy something a little different, Heretic’s Fork is absolutely worth a look. Just remember that you’ve been put in charge of Hell… Try not to get fired!