This roguelike deckbuilder may look like edutainment, but its maths-based battles are surprisingly tense and strategic

The thrill of every great roguelike deckbuilder is, at its core, a simple one: make the numbers as big as they can go.

It's surprisingly bold, then, that upcoming game Talystro turns that entirely on its head. On this little mouse's quest, the goal is instead to make specific numbers.

Enemies don't have health, they simply are a number—as low as one or, in my experience so far, as high as 55 (terrifying!). To kill them, you need to generate an attack that meets that number exactly—only an 11 will beat an 11, or a 23 for a 23. In other words precision, not power, is king.

Each round you roll a set of dice and draw a hand of cards. Dice slot into spaces on the cards, which add or subtract from their result in different ways. All cards with dice currently slotted contribute to your total attack number—once it's where you want it, you can launch it and destroy an enemy.

It's partly a game of maths—faced with a set of numbers and modifiers, you're looking for the most direct ways to reach specific results. But it's also about resource management. With only so many dice and slots each round, the trick is using what you have as efficiently as possible.

Playing through my first few runs, I'm surprised how tense it feels searching for those perfect solutions. Trying out different possible configurations and trying to trim down how many resources they burn through is almost like carefully tuning a radio until you find the one killer frequency.

My favourite bit of design is that each encounter consists of a whole series of enemies, and as you defeat each one, they're immediately replaced by the next one in the queue. It's not a punishment for success—the new enemies come in "idle", so they won't start attacking until the next round. What it is is a chance to stunt.

Pull off an efficient series of kills, and your reward is a fresh set of targets, there to be taken out by whatever spare dice and cards you've managed to conserve. It's like hitting a flow state but with maths—and if you'd been in my class at school, you'd know how unlikely me saying that is.

A charming visual style inspired by retro cartoons (let's be honest, probably via Cuphead), casting you as a nervous mouse battling sentient numbers, sprinkles on just enough personality to prevent all this number-crunching feeling too dry or abstract. There are some rough edges in the early build I'm playing—the UI particularly could stand to be a lot more responsive—but it's early days yet, with a release date still yet to be announced.

I'm told, however, that there should be a public demo on the way soon, so it's well worth putting Talystro on your Steam wishlist if I've piqued your curiosity. Hopefully it gets a proper ETA along with it—then we can all start counting down the days.