This Slay the Spire-like made to teach a dev’s daughter maths looks like the best edutainment game I never had
If you’re like me, you probably have at least one treasured memory of being allowed to play an edutainment game at school under the guise of learning. What a blast, getting to play video games at school! For me, it was a floppy disk with a bizarre Pac-Man clone where you had to answer maths questions every time you ran into an enemy or obstacle. I’m sure for others it might be unforgiving classic Oregon Trail or globetrotting trivia quiz Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
While I treasure that memory dearly, I knew even then that the game I was playing was more than a bit crap – no matter how good it made me at sums or let me get out of doing normal schoolwork. If only the next game from chess-roguelike Shotgun King developers Punkcake Délicieux had existed at the time, offering up a modern bit of edutainment that looks to be both educational and genuinely fun to play.
The game is yet to have a name officially revealed, though in-game cards visible in a GIF shared to X suggest it might be called Algebrawl, which is a pretty top-notch pun if so.
Punkcake Délicieux’s Benjamin Soule – half of the studio’s development team alongside Rémy Devaux, joined by composer Pentadrangle – said that the game started life last November as a way to teach the developer’s seven-year-old daughter addition and multiplication, before developing into a full release for the studio.
Even from the short GIF, it’s easy to see the appeal. The clip’s adorable pixel art shows a sword-wielding boar creature in a crown and robe – presumably the player – leading a group of small mice and boar followers into battle against a group of slime and goblin-like creatures, much like an encounter in Slay the Spire.
Each character has a number attached to them, with the player able to arrange their minions before applying scrolls with mathematical effects – including add, multiply, divide and square. By combining their followers’ numbers and the equations to match those of the enemies – that’d be the ‘teach you maths’ bit – the player can dispatch the foes, with any enemies left once the numerical grunts are used up dealing damage to the player’s character. To encourage the most efficient maths, any followers you don’t use before all enemies are defeated will turn against you – meaning you really want to make the sums add up perfectly to avoid taking damage.
After battle, the clip shows the player able to reveal cards from a facedown grid of four, gaining what looks like a new follower and ability or item. A bar along the bottom of the screen shows an alternating series of battles and items before encountering what’s presumably a big final boss represented by a skull if usual video game logic holds.
It genuinely looks like a great game, that just happens to boost your arithmetic ability along the way. Luckily for us, Soule’s decision to make it into a full release means we’ll all be able to practise our sums soon, with the game said to be nearly finished and planned for release via Steam and Itch.io “soon”.
