ANTHEM#9 fuses deckbuilding and gem-matching into an addictive roguelite.

*ANTHEM#9*. Credit: Koeda / Shueisha Games

Self-taught solo developer Koeda’s ANTHEM#9, published by Shueisha Games, mashes together a deckbuilding roguelite and a gem-matching puzzle game. It's a novel combination that works better than it should. Between its high combo ceiling and three wildly different playable characters, it’s the kind of addictive game that constantly tempts you into just one more run.

You play as the agents of ANTHEM#9, a secret organization tasked with eliminating global threats like mad scientists and spies. The story stays deliberately light, delivered through brief mission descriptions and short interactions. On the whole, it's just background that's not important or impactful for enjoyment of the game. I had a blast with it on a purely mechanical level.

Each run follows a familiar roguelite structure with a branching map with nodes for battles, shops, skill upgrades, random events, and the like, with multiple floors that culminate in a boss fight. Each of the three playable agents, Rubit, Phannie, and Beni, has multiple missions with escalating difficulty, plus extra missions after completion for a challenging endgame.

You manage two swappable skill sets and a deck of blessing cards you build over the course of a run. Skills cost sequences of multiple gems to play, and each turn, you'll randomly draw a set number of random gems. The interesting twist lies in chaining: if the last gem of a skill matches the color of the first gem of another skill, you only pay the overlapping cost once, opening up the possibility of combos far larger than what your gem pool would allow. The bigger the combo, the more damage, and the more damage, the greater the chance that you'll cancel your opponent's upcoming attacks. At the start of each turn, you pick a card from your blessings deck to gain buffs for that turn or for the whole battle; this is an additional layer that could change your strategy.

You only play the first few gems in your inventory, and need a way to cycle through them if they're not the right colors for your skills. For this, each agent has a unique special ability to manipulate the gems for an action point (AP) cost. Rubit can spend AP to change the color of a gem. Phannie gets stacked double-gems, which he can pay AP to split up. Beni can spend AP to consume gems for buffs. This is what makes the game feel so varied: each agent relies on completely different strategies that feel like more than just minor variations.

At skill upgrade nodes, you have two distinct options that you must select carefully: new skills or gem switching. You can replace skills in either of your sets with new ones you find, or choose a duplicate to level up that skill with a multiplier and power boost. With gem switching, you can select a single gem on the skill and change its color, crucial for optimizing combo chains and balancing color distribution. Bad decisions here can doom your run.

The game is completely driven by menu interfaces. Battles take place in an abstract space, where you can only see character and enemy portraits. The UI leans heavily on bold colors and angular black borders, a look clearly inspired by the Persona games, but ANTHEM#9 doesn't quite reach its inspiration’s level of flair. However, it's clean and easy to read, with enough satisfying animations and effects. Seeing a stack of dozens of attacks fly into your enemy like daggers never gets old.

ANTHEM#9 pulls off a novel mix of genres for addictive, rewarding gameplay. While its visual style isn't original and the story is thin, the mechanical depth and design are sharp and rewarding. Koeda's debut is worth picking up if you're looking for something that feels different from the usual deckbuilder. I hope to see updates or DLC with more agents to try!

ANTHEM#9 is available now on Steam.