Becoming Captain - The Roguelike Deckbuilder

Build the deck while the fight is still going

The one-line pitch on Becoming Captain's Steam page is also its most accurate description: "you build your deck during the fight." Most card roguelikes since Slay the Spire hand you a static deck for a battle and let you edit it only between fights, on a shop screen or a reward node. Here the drafting happens live — new cards and temporary combat options appear mid-encounter, on top of the permanent cards you add between rounds — so the deck you finish a fight with is rarely the one you started it with. One Steam reviewer summed up the appeal in six words: "Deck building in its purest form," and another called the weapon-card variety "a really cool system that adds a lot of replay value."

The second structural choice compounds the first. Health is not reset between encounters the way it is in most of the genre; it carries forward within a run, so a fight you scraped through leaves you weaker for the one after it. "Health carries over, so if you were bleeding all over the deck, you may not be in the best shape for the next fight," as one reviewer put it. Between the two systems, a run in Becoming Captain punishes a messy fight twice — once in the deck you're left holding, once in the health bar you carry into the next room — which is a more aggressive version of the genre's usual risk curve than a Slay the Spire run, where a full-heal rest site is never far away.

Reading all seven reviews this game has

As of this review, Becoming Captain has exactly seven Steam user reviews — in English or any other language — and all seven are positive. That is not a filtered sample; it is the complete review corpus for a title three months past its 1 May 2026 launch. Read together, they describe the same game from slightly different angles: praise for the synergy-hunting between perks and cards, enjoyment of the "slashing enemies like a hot knife through butter" once a build clicks, and a recurring note that the whole thing still feels early. "This game's still pretty basic, but the enjoyment isn't," one reviewer wrote, saying they'd be "replaying this one each major update." Another, who says they followed the game on social media through years of development before launch, opened with "Wooden Buckler OP!" before praising the game's stability and clear rules — tempered by "one minor bug (one of the perks that should reduce the cost of shop refresh didn't work)."

That specific bug — a shop-refresh discount perk not applying — is not an isolated complaint. A second, independent review flags "a few bugs here and there" without naming specifics, and a third names character portraits failing to load as an ongoing annoyance, though adds it "didn't take away from the overall experience or the fun." Two unrelated reviewers naming overlapping bug categories, out of a pool of only seven, is a large enough share to flag rather than dismiss — and there simply isn't a bigger sample to check it against yet.

What the achievement curve says about the difficulty

Steam's global achievement data is more useful here than usual, because it's the only large-sample evidence available for a game this new. Becoming Captain ships six achievements, and the completion curve falls off a cliff partway through:

• Playing your first game — 90.0%
• Killing a desperate slave — 85.0%
• Defeating Big Billy — 70.0%
• Besting the beast — 27.5%
• Who's the captain now? (winning a run) — 25.0%
• Destroying the cyborg Dayanara (a secret late encounter) — 17.5%

Nine in ten owners get through an opening game, and seven in ten clear an early boss fight named Big Billy — a healthy, approachable start. Then the floor drops out: fewer than three in ten ever best "the beast," and only a quarter of owners have ever actually won a run and become the captain. That's a steep curve, but it's the shape a roguelike's curve is supposed to have — losing runs is the genre's core mechanic, not a sign the game is unfairly hard or artificially padded the way a stalled achievement curve sometimes signals in other genres. It does mean the "still pretty basic" complaint and the mid-fight drafting hook are both true for the same reason: most owners, by the game's own numbers, never see much past the early game before a run ends them.

A solo developer's first full release

Becoming Captain is credited to Le Havre Création, and the game's own itch.io devlogs — where an earlier public demo ran through 2025 and into 2026 under developer name "Frank" — describe a project built and iterated on largely solo, incorporating feedback from a Steam Next Fest demo before the 1 May 2026 launch, including "balancing, UI and UX" passes and new boss music. The developer's own launch-week devlog is candid about scope: "On day one, you'll get the complete core experience. While we already have plans for future content, we believe what's launching is solid and fun enough to stand as a full release." That framing lines up with what the reviews describe — a complete, playable game rather than an early-access placeholder, but one whose "planned features," as one reviewer put it after reading the roadmap, are still ahead of it rather than behind it. The system requirements page carries the same honesty: minimum graphics specs are listed as "Still in testing."

Where it sits next to the genre's touchstones

Slay the Spire, Balatro and Monster Train all built their reputations on giving players tools to hunt for a specific build — removals, upgrades, rerolls, targeted rewards — so that a deck's identity sharpens as a run goes on. Becoming Captain's answer to the same problem is structural rather than a toolkit: instead of curating a static hand between fights, you're reacting inside the fight itself, drafting whatever the encounter throws at you and hoping the "custom perks," as one reviewer called them, hold a build together. It's a different kind of tension from Slay the Spire's careful, unhurried deck-thinning, closer to the on-the-fly improvisation of a run where the plan changes every few turns rather than every few fights. Whether that reads as "refreshing" or "chaotic" seems to depend on temperament more than skill, based on how the existing reviews describe it — but none of the seven describe it as a bad trade, and more than one explicitly frames it as the thing that sets the game apart from the deckbuilders they'd already played.

What none of them can yet say, because the sample doesn't exist to say it, is whether that hook holds up over dozens of hours the way Slay the Spire's ascension system or Balatro's joker pool does. The longest playtime among the seven reviews is under six hours.

Verdict

Becoming Captain earns its positive reviews honestly: building a deck live, mid-fight, while carrying your wounds into the next room is a real point of difference in a genre that mostly agrees on how deckbuilding should work, and every reviewer who has weighed in so far — all seven of them — says it's fun. The achievement data backs up a genuine, well-shaped difficulty curve rather than a grind wall, and NZ$17.99 with a free demo attached is a fair, low-risk way to find out for yourself whether the on-the-fly drafting clicks. What keeps the score from going higher is simply how little there is to weigh it against: a handful of reviews, a handful of achievements, a few repeated bug reports with no way to tell if they're still current, and a solo developer's first full release that is honest about having more content ahead of it than behind it. Play the demo, and treat the full price as a bet on where a promising, quiet launch goes next rather than a verdict on a finished body of work.

Steam pricing, review figures and achievement data checked 11 August 2026.