Across the Obelisk

One deck, four players, no shared seed required

Slay the Spire made the single-lane, single-deck deckbuilder the genre's default shape, and Monster Train's answer to multiplayer — Hell Rush, where up to eight players race the same seed without ever touching each other's boards — accepted that shape rather than breaking it. Across the Obelisk breaks it. Up to four players build one party and pilot one shared deck together in real time: everyone drafts cards into the same pool, votes on which node the party visits next, and can prompt teammates mid-combat about which card to play on their turn. It's the difference between "we're both playing the same level" and "we're playing the same run," and it's the reason Dreamsite Games' co-op deckbuilder found its own audience rather than reading as a reskin of games that came before it — Paradox's own figures put lifetime sales past 350,000 copies, and Steam's review corpus, checked 3 August 2026, sits at Very Positive: 10,486 of 13,031 reviews recommend it, an 80.5% share.

That's a genuinely good number for a game four years past its 1.0 launch. It's also a lower number than Wanderer's Monster Train review found for a single-player deckbuilder built on a comparable idea, and the gap between the two review corpuses tells you almost everything about where this game's problems actually sit — not in the cards, but in what happened to the business around them.

Building a party instead of a deck

The base game ships five zones' worth of map, more than a hundred cards and items, and a roster of sixteen-plus playable heroes split across distinct classes, each contributing a different role to a four-person party the way a tabletop group might split into tank, healer, mage and scout. The deckbuilding decisions compound across the whole party rather than sitting inside one player's hand: a healer's card choices change what a warrior can safely risk next turn, and a party that never coordinates its damage types loses fights a coordinated one wouldn't. That's the mechanical payoff of the co-op structure, and it's real — screenrant's launch coverage called it "a great middle between D&D and deckbuilding" for exactly this reason, while noting plainly that the card design itself "doesn't measure up to the genre's greats" like Slay the Spire. Both things are true at once. The innovation here is structural, not a deeper card pool or a cleverer keyword system, and judged purely as a stack of individual cards, Across the Obelisk is competent rather than exceptional.

Where the party structure earns its keep is in replayability. A four-person group choosing between sixteen-plus heroes produces a genuinely different party composition from one run to the next in a way a solo deckbuilder's clan-pairing system can't fully match, because every seat at the table is a separate person making separate choices under time pressure. Disagreements over which tile to visit get settled by a card draw rather than deadlock, which keeps a four-way vote from turning into an argument, and the in-combat chat and card-suggestion tools mean a stronger player can mentor a weaker one without simply taking over their turn.

The bill that keeps arriving

The most consistent single complaint across the game's review history, by a wide margin, has nothing to do with any of that. Across the Obelisk currently carries 15 separate paid DLC listings on Steam — full act-length expansions, extra heroes, cosmetic packs — and Steam's own community discussion boards are dense with threads asking the same question in different words: "Why is the DLC more expensive than the base game?", "$20 DLC for a $20 game?", "What the hell is with this DLC pricing?" The specifics vary by thread, but the shape of the complaint doesn't: an expansion covering roughly one new area, a couple of heroes and a card set costs close to what the entire base game costs, which ships five areas and sixteen-plus heroes. Sands of Ulminin, the expansion released alongside Paradox's full acquisition of the game in August 2023, launched at US$19.99 — within a dollar of the base game's own list price for a fraction of its content. Community estimates for buying every current DLC on top of the base game land around US$70-90, and negative reviews from as recently as January 2025 cite totals in that same range as their reason for recommending against the game to newcomers, even players with hundreds of hours already logged.

None of that is about the deckbuilding. It's a pricing decision, made after the game had already built a large, loyal player base on its original terms, and the reviews written specifically about it read less like buyer's remorse and more like players who feel a game they already trusted changed the deal on them.

A launcher problem that wasn't really about this game

A second, separate wave of negative reviews clusters tightly around February through June 2024, and it's worth separating from the DLC complaints because it's a different issue with a different cause. Paradox rolled out a new Paradox Launcher across its published catalogue in early 2024, requiring players to agree to an updated EULA with data-sharing language before they could keep playing — a change that hit multiple Paradox titles at once, from Cities: Skylines to Europa Universalis IV, not just this one. Across the Obelisk's own Steam discussion boards carry threads from the same window flagging exactly this ("Paradox will harvest your data with their new launcher"), and the negative-review sample from that period repeats the same language: an unwanted account requirement, a launcher installed without clear warning, and a EULA change imposed on people who'd already bought the game under different terms. It's a fair complaint, and a well-documented one, but it's a Paradox-wide policy decision rather than anything specific to how this game is built — worth knowing before assuming every 2024 one-star review is about DLC.

Party of four, plus the bugs that come with it

Real-time shared decision-making across four players and one deck is a harder engineering problem than a single-player turn queue, and Across the Obelisk's bug forums show the cost of it plainly. Desync reports recur across Steam's troubleshooting board well past launch — mismatched card costs when multiple cards tie for the same value, towns and shops falling out of sync between players, specific cards and abilities named as repeat offenders — and the most common fix volunteered by the community is simply restarting the multiplayer session, which is a rough workaround for a run that four people have already invested time in. It isn't the kind of game-breaking instability that shows up on every playthrough, and it hasn't stopped the game's review share from staying comfortably in "Very Positive" territory, but it's a persistent enough thread across the bug forums, years apart, that the underlying synchronisation issues clearly haven't been fully run to ground.

What the achievement data actually shows

Steam's global achievement percentages for Across the Obelisk don't tell as clean a story as they sometimes do for this genre, and it's worth being honest about the shape of the data rather than forcing it into a tidier narrative. The lowest completion rates on the list — under 4%, down to 0.3% for the rarest — belong almost entirely to hidden, event-specific achievements tied to rare narrative encounters that a lot of owners may simply never stumble into, which measures event rarity more than it measures player attrition or difficulty. What is worth noting is the ceiling at the other end: out of 157 total achievements, not one is held by more than 82% of owners, and that top tier belongs to fairly basic milestones — recruiting a party member, visiting a town, collecting thirty cards of a given class. For a game whose opening hours are meant to be approachable, an achievement that simple sitting at 82% rather than something closer to Monster Train's 96.6%-owners-beat-the-first-boss figure suggests a meaningful share of buyers don't get far past the opening runs, which lines up with a review corpus full of players who say they stopped over a launcher prompt or a DLC price tag rather than a fight they lost.

Console ports that didn't starve the PC version

Across the Obelisk's platform history is one of the more level-headed parts of its story. It spent roughly sixteen months in Early Access before its 16 August 2022 1.0 launch — itself the debut title under Paradox's newly announced Paradox Arc publishing partnership, a marketing and distribution deal rather than an acquisition at that point — and didn't reach consoles until Nintendo Switch on 21 March 2024, followed by PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on 6 November

2024. Full acquisition into Paradox's main portfolio came in between, in August 2023. None of the

console ports cut Steam Achievements, Cloud saves or cross-play, and a mixed-platform group of friends can sit in the same run regardless of which box they own — a genuinely good outcome for a co-op game, and one that's easy to overlook next to the pricing complaints.

Verdict

Across the Obelisk gets the one thing that actually matters for a co-op deckbuilder right: four players sharing one party and one deck, arguing over the same map and the same hand of cards, is a better multiplayer answer to this genre than anything Slay the Spire or Monster Train offers, and the base game alone is a complete, sizeable roguelite that earned its 80.5% Steam approval honestly. What keeps this from scoring alongside those two games is almost entirely business decisions made after the fact: a DLC roster that its own community consistently calls predatory, a 2024 launcher and EULA change that cost it a distinct wave of goodwill, and multiplayer plumbing that still throws desyncs years after launch. Buy the base game for the co-op hook. Skip the DLC until you've read what current owners say about it, and don't expect this to be the tighter card game Slay the Spire fans are hoping for — that was never really the point.

Anyone who'd rather build one character's progression slowly over weeks than argue over a shared deck for an evening might find Wanderer a better fit for the same "playing this together" instinct, minus the DLC storefront.

Pricing, review figures and achievement data checked 3 August 2026.