YMMV / Night of the Full Moon

• Breather Boss: The Sword in the Stone is this. Its main gimmick is that the leftmost card in your hand becomes an exact copy of the last card that you use. This obviously works to your advantage, allowing you to, for example, spam cards with powerful effects that you only have 1 or 2 copies of, or draw your entire deck out while still dealing damage to the Sword in the Stone. Also, while the boss's deck sounds pretty scary on paper, since it has a lot of Storm Strikes it can copy along with some Basic Attacks, its ability does not apply to it, meaning you're the only one who gets to benefit from it.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: While there are multiple different build paths for each and every class in each and every mode, in many cases there's one that's far and away the best and, consequently, the only one you'll ever use unless the game simply refuses to offer you the cards and blessings you need for it (which in extreme cases such as Nightmare difficulty may just mean you're simply screwed), or for fun.
  • The Little Witch has many different build paths depending on which element she chooses to focus on, including fire, lightning and poison. The problem is that Ice is simply the flat-out best build as it combines potent and affordable offence with a powerful defence in the form of Chill, which can negate almost all an enemy's damage, as well as exploit the awesome Absolute Zero blessing mentioned below.
  • While the Nun doesn't have to fully commit to a single build path as much as many other classes and can mix-and-match freely, it's still very hard to resist the temptation to lean on the power of Confession and its continually-stacking free piercing damage, rather than messing around with Prayer timers.
  • The Soul Hunter's Judgement stacking is seriously overshadowed by the efficiency of simply piling on Siphon cards to drain away your opponent's mana and life, keeping spell users crippled while doubling down on the Life Drain against enemies who don't have mana.
  • The Werewolf only really had a single build path when he was first released, and that was Rage stacking. Even when his card pool was expanded with a number of cards that support an alternate build based around transforming his cards into different forms, it's gimmicky and hard to put together (since your starting deck is still built towards Rage stacking) and doesn't work unless you get your hards on an extensive set of supporting cards, most essentially the keystone card Ultimate Form. Meanwhile, Rage stacking is entirely dependent on getting the Anger Aroused blessing (which gives you an amount of Rage at the start of each turn equal to the current turn number) to the extent that if you don't get it from your starting Fairy Blessing, you should just go back to the menu and start the run over again.
  • Trying to play a deck focused on the Queen herself as your primary damage source in The Wishing Night campaign can be fun, but will always be less efficient and more risky than focusing on stacking Parry instead and exploiting effects that are triggered by it (such as the Old Hunter which deals damage whenever an ally gains Parry), since without Parry your guys are liable to get wiped out no matter how much damage you do.
  • Similarly, while Red the Mechanic's Recharge and Strengthen builds can be fun and add a lot of punch, you NEED to focus on Embed or, again, your guys will simply not go the distance against late-game damage.
• Fridge Brilliance: The Werewolf boss gives you a Sadistic Choice at the start of each turn, but sometimes offers you an option that benefits you. Fitting for an Apologetic Attacker who can't fully bring himself to kill his only friend, even in self-defense.
• Game-Breaker: Like with many card games, there are some incredibly powerful cards and blessings that should prove useful for clearing the game, especially when used in combination:
  • Hoodwinked and Tricked as the Magician. Tricked is an attack card that exiles itself from your deck for the rest of the combat when you play it, but digs through your deck and plays three random counter cards automatically. Hoodwinked is a counter card that triggers itself when EITHER player plays an attack card and generates two copies of that attack card in your hand. Simply play Hoodwinked first then play Tricked, and it will trigger Hoodwinked, setting up three more counter cards for you and generating two more copies of Tricked in your hand. This combo can shut down any enemy in the game for several turns.
  • The Book of Hunger, a rare equipment for the Witch, is quite simply insanely overpowered: at the end of each one of your turns it automatically casts the highest-cost spell you own for free, no strings attached. Even if you don't have anything stronger than, say, a level 2 Fireball, that's still a free 18 damage per turn, and if you have any of the insanely powerful (but also insanely expensive) elite spells in your deck like Deadly Fire (deal 20 damage upfront and another 20 damage next turn) the Book can completely trivialise practically any opponent. Unfortunately it only appears in the Red Hood Diaries, although it can be integrated into the main game after you complete it.
  • Speaking of Witches: the Absolute Zero blessing removes stacks of Chilled from the enemy to give the Little Witch extra turns^note First 5 stacks, then 10, then 15, and so on. Frost Nova can inflict a whopping 20 stacks, and there are a few ways to double that. Put it all together, and it can net you at least three turns in a row before your opponent thaws out. More if you can add enough stacks.
  • And speaking of Witch Blessings that deal with Chill, the Ice Flame Bonfire is simply amazing, largely because it provides 2 different effects at once. Inflicting 6 free stacks of Chill on the enemy at the start of each turn, while very useful, is the lesser of the two, as it also grants you 2 free stacks of Pyro as well, which increases every instance of Fire damage you deal by your number of stacks. Pyro is a very powerful effect, but can normally only be increased by the Attack card Flickering Flames or the Mana card Magic Flames, which can make it hard to stack up enough, which the Ice Flame Bonfire trivialises. While not that impressive with most main Fire spells, which only inflict a single large instance of damage, when you let it accumulate enough then an effect that can apply multiple repeated instances like the mana card Piercing Spell (3 instances of 1 damage) or the spell Firewall or equipment card Blazing Cloak (2 damage every time the enemy plays an Attack card) it can rack up insane amounts of damage.
  • The Witch has a lot of these, really. Another possibility is weaponizing Cross Magic; on its own, the blessing causes you to gain twice your base mana at the start of each fight. Every two mana you gain triggers the Magic Staff for one physical damage, which in turn can trigger a Torch for one fire damage, and you can equip multiple copies of either. Build your base mana high enough, and this setup can near-kill most enemies before you even get to play a card.
  • Wolf’s Roar as the Werewolf is useful on its own, preventing enemies from playing your choice of attack, action, or spell cards for two turns. But play a copy of Paranoia first, and it’ll lock down all three at once. Find or clone multiple copies of Wolf’s Roar, and your prey can’t do much but stand there while you rip them to shreds.
  • Damage-based healing from the Vampire Sword equipment or the Vampire Codex Pandora Blessing. High-damage builds can suffer from attrition really badly against tanky opponents, especially in higher difficulty stages where healing from level-ups and healing encounters is reduced, but the ability to recover HP when you damage the opponent can easily trivialise almost any threat by exploiting the Health/Damage Asymmetry to repeatedly heal you to full health in one turn's worth of blasting.
  • The Mechanic's Mechanical Transmission is so comically broken that it's ridiculous. It's an Exhausted card, one of a series of cards that all give you +1 action and then spend ALL of your actions to generate an increasingly-powerful effect depending on how many actions you spent on it. Mechanical Transmission's effect? Replicate the effects of every other Exhausted card in your deck at once! The idea of Exhausted cards is that they're all-in cards, of which you can only play one per turn to generate one massive effect, with all the others only being able to generate a minimal 1-proc effect if you play them as well, but Mechanical Transmission effectively lets you fire off several turns worth of full power effects, completely inverting the entire concept of Exhausted. Once you have even a couple of base actions to spend and a couple of other Exhausted cards (like Energy Bombing, Current Injection and Repair Wrench) in your deck, Mechanical Transmission is so broken that it will generally one-shot almost any enemy on its own, and even take a massive chunk out of bosses with minimal effort.
  • One of the most fundamental cases is the common attack card Storm Strike, which is available to the Lady Knight and Magician as well as being used by many (of the most troublesome) enemies. All it does is inflict 4/6 Lightning damage and increase all further damage the user inflicts that turn by 1. The thing is, being an attack card it costs nothing to use, and it stacks. Combining multiple copies with multi-hitting effects like Omnislice or Lethal Weapon and you can do outrageous amounts of damage very easily. This is also what makes the enemies who like to spam it against you (like the Ghost Captain or the Feral Child) so dangerous, and they can easily chew through practically your entire HP bar in only a single turn- and then do it again the next one!
  • The Spirit Caller’s Fusion Dance mechanics are ripe for abuse if you can find the right materials. For example, fusing a Solar Spirit^note copies itself when exiled, a Lunar Spirit^note deals piercing damage twice and then exiles itself and a Light Spirit^note generates half the damage it deals in mana will create a perpetual motion damage spell that ignores most defenses, clones itself, and gives you mana to cast the clones with. Repeat until victorious. Also of note is the Living Spirit, which activates for free whenever Growth triggers and causes anything it’s fused with to do the same.
• Minimalist Run: Having only up to ten cards by the end of the game nets you the Minimalist achievement.
• Spiritual Successor: Of Dream Quest.
• Tear Jerker: The true ending of chapter 4, Red crying onto the cover of the Full Moon storybook as she closes it after the Little Carpenter dies saving her life.
• That One Achievement: While exact completion numbers can be hard to gauge due to some achievements (such as bonus class completion or the entire set of Red Hood Diaries achievements) being tied to paid DLC in a nominally free game, there are two definite contenders:
  • "Indifferent" requires you to beat a boss without playing a single card, essentially requiring you to build a setup that can do enough damage and survive entirely off passive Blessing/Equipment effects.
  • "Save the Black Forest" requires you to defeat the True Final Boss, the Nature Spirit, in a single turn. There's a number of these achievements for different bosses in the game, but this is definitely the hardest; aside from its mammoth HP pool, it also has a unique gimmick where the first time you bring it down it revives and corrupts half the cards in your deck. Appropriately enough, the achievement icon is a Shout-Out to Dark Souls. Despite being available to players of the free version of the game (albeit added in an expansion update that a lot of old players will have missed), both of these achievements have a global completion rate of only 2.2% on Steam.
  • Another one that's particularly difficult is "Curse Purification" which requires you to take the monster abilities from the other 3 story bosses in the Red Hood Diaries and defeat Midas with them. The cards, abilities and blessings you unlock from defeating opponents in the campaign can be selected at the start of a run to improve your chances, but the skill you get from the Vampire Lord (which does nothing), the card you get from the Viper Queen (which also does nothing, effectively a Prank card) and the blessing you get from Black Swan (lose 1 health for every card you play) do nothing except make your run harder. To make matters worse, you can only face Midas as the final boss on a Hard V run, the highest level of difficulty. With the additional handicaps of the useless and actively harmful boss abilities, an already difficult boss becomes almost unbeatable, which is why the achievement only has a 1.5% global completion rate on Steam.
  • "The Weak Body" is also absurdly difficult, requiring you to get a combined 999 stacks of debuffs (Poisoned/Chilled/Burned/Stuck) on an enemy at once. There is basically precisely one way of completing this, and it requires a very specific setup: a Witch build utilising multiple sources of poison, the extremely rare spell Wither (which doubles all stacks of Poison on the target before adding 6 more), the less-rare spell Toxicity Spread, which applies a number of Chilled stacks equal to the number of Poisoned stacks on the target before adding 3 more, and some way of multiplying the effects or generating duplicate copies of both spells. The problem is that Wither is very, very, very rare- you can easily do 5 or 6 runs through the Full Moon campaign, visiting every single Grimalkin Shop and opening every single chest along the way, and not be able to obtain a single copy, and without it you're wasting your time- there's simply no way to build up the requisite number of Poison stacks without its multiplicative effects (pretty much any enemy in the game will simply die from the poison long before you can reach 999- assuming you don't die yourself first). While not quite as bad as the above examples, the achievement still only has a global completion of 2.3% on Steam.
• That One Boss: Although the game does have bosses, every enemy is unique and therefore technically bosses rather than Demonic Spiders.
  • The Magic Mirror is a potentially annoying mid-game stumbling block, due to being, unsurprisingly, a Mirror Match as he copies your deck. While he can't make use of your abilities and doesn't start with any of your equipped items or blessings, he's likely to have more HP and a larger hand size than you at this point in the game (he's usually level 5 or 6), particularly if you're damaged from a previous encounter, and if he simply gets better draws than you he can blow you off the field with your own cards in short order.
  • The Phantom Captain, a Ghost Pirate, is a particularly annoying enemy to certain decks due to his passive power Bewitch, which causes the first 2 damaging cards you play each turn to hit you instead. If you don't have a couple of expendable weak low-damage attack cards to soak it up for minimal harm, you may be left with no options that won't do more damage to yourself than to the enemy! The Soul Hunter is particularly vulnerable to this if they get particularly unlucky and get stuck with several copies of their unique, high-damage Death Comes attacks. Additionally, he abuses the horribly overpowered card Plunder, which simultaneously heals him, destroys 2 of your equipment, and negates one of your prayers, which makes him a nightmare for any player whose build it based around specific pieces of equipment or Nuns. And his offence is based around the Boring, but Practical strategy of spamming repeated copies of Storm Strike (does damage and increases all other damage he does by 1 that turn, stacking up repeatedly) with Flying Kick and a string of basic attacks to simply bludgeon you into submission, easily doing up to 30-40 damage per turn if you encounter him late-game, which combined with his propensity for turning your own attacks against you, is simply overwhelming for a lot of decks.
  • The Headless Horseman can absorb a ridiculous amount of damage due to the fact that the first two times you defeat him he instantly revives with reduced HP. An extra nasty wrinkle to this is his Obsession buff, which causes any overkill damage you do to him (including damage done on the hits that cause him to revive) to be reflected onto you instead- and if this kills you, you lose, even if the damage was from the hit that finished him off for good. Decks that are able to build up huge bursts of damage (like Judgement-based Soul Hunters and their massive damage Death Comes spells) can easily end up killing themselves if they don't (or aren't able to) calculate their damage carefully to bring him down with the minimum of overkill. Making matters worse, his offence is almost entirely based around stacking up Confession, which does increasing amounts of piercing damage at the end of each of his turns, and unlike with the Priest, this does not reset every time he revives himself, so if you take too much time trying to work around his Obsession (or are simply unable to chew through his ridiculous combined HP total) you will inevitably lose to his unpreventable damage.
  • The Poker Soldier poses a unique problem to some decks due to lacking a deck of its own; It deals large amounts of damage automatically each turn that can only be prevented by doing enough damage to him. Cards like Prank and Fear can’t slow it down, counter cards have nothing to respond to, and status effects like Burn never trigger. Basically, any deck that favors the indirect approach is going to have a hard time.
  • The Jungle Giant, while an easy encounter for most classes, can be almost impossible for the Nun to defeat. He has a unique gimmick where he only draws cards at the end of his turn, drawing an additional one each time, and his entire deck is made up of the high-damage Attack card Crush, but he discards a card whenever he gets hit. All the other classes can easily hit him enough times with Spam Attacks to make him discard his entire hand before he can bludgeon them to death- but the Nun's style is uniquely unsuited to this requirement, and can't generate enough separate instances of damage to be able to make him repeatedly empty his hand before he can flatten her, while her healing and armour gain can't even begin to keep up with the barrage of Crushes, her Prayers don't have enough time to trigger unless they're set so low that they have minimal effect, and her Confessions only apply a single proc of damage, which isn't enough to chew through his massive HP pool for the stage of the game he appears at.
  • The Black Rose can be really problematic for certain classes, mainly because of her passive which causes you to lose all actions and mana the first time in a turn you play any card that inflicts damage on her- even if it doesn't actually inflict damage when you play it (like various counter cards)! Highly annoying for action-based decks, it's crippling for mana-based decks who don't regain all their mana at the start of each round like you do with actions. Classes that rely on spamming multiple low-damage spells to add up to a bigger effect (like Apothecary or Conjurer) can have a nightmare of a time bringing her down before she kills them- which is something that will only take a few turns, as her entire attack strategy is based around spamming absurd amounts of poison onto you until you're taking 20-30 damage per turn, far more than any but the tankiest of builds can hope to survive.
• Underused Game Mechanic: The Courage/Reputation system, where you gain points from visual novel-esque interactions with defeated enemies that can give you bonuses and determine which boss you face at the end of the run. For some reason, it only appears in Normal mode, while most of your time in the game will be spent playing through the various iterations of Hard difficulty.
• The Woobie: The Little Carpenter. Born a werewolf from his parents' forbidden romance and left as a Doorstop Baby, he was bullied by the other kids when he was a child. The only one who would stand up for him and be his friend was Little Red, but when an early moonrise on the night of full moon caused him to start transforming while in the village, he had to run away from her and hide in a miserable cave in the depths of the Dark Forest all night long while listening to her desperately calling out to and searching for him. Despite his strong feelings for her, he can't confess because of his fear of her finding out his secret and possibly rejecting him, so he continues to hide in the forest every full moon night — which unfortunately leads to a tragic encounter when Red is forced to search the woods herself for her missing grandmother and, oblivious to his identity, singles "the Big Bad Wolf" out as a possible culprit. If you get the true ending, she instead finds out his secret and realises he's not guilty, apparently accepting him despite his curse — but in the end, he dies saving Red's life from the explosion of the Nature Spirit.
  • It is, if anything, even worse for him if you play chapter 4 from the Werewolf's perspective- rather than sacrificing his life to save Red and her Grandma, she sacrifices hers to save him instead, leaving to miserably trek back through the forest to town alone, carrying her torn red hood as a Tragic Keepsake.