Book of Demons has attracted lots of praise for its mix of deck building and hack-and-slashing during two years in Early Access. A whopping 93% of its 2,400 user reviews are positive—and this week developer Thing Trunk released the full 1.0 version, complete with a new set of magic cards to play with.

It takes place in a pop-up book called the Paperverse, a world which is inspired by the first Diablo game. You battle more than 70 different types of monsters in procedurally-generated dungeons, and all your weapons, spells and skills are represented by cards. 

You're still clicking on baddies to attack but your deck, and how you adapt it to different situations, determines how successful you'll be. Movement is restricted to specific lanes so that you can concentrate on playing your cards right, and you can upgrade cards as you progress. 

The thing that interests me most is Flexiscope, a system that Thing Trunk says will "let you decide the length of quests". Basically, when you start a new game you can adjust a slider to tell Book of Demons how long you want individual play sessions to last, and it'll adjust its world and enemies accordingly. It'll learn as you play, too, fine-tuning itself for your next session. It's a cool idea, and players seem to love the way it's implemented. 

On average, it takes 10 hours to finish the campaign with one class, but there are plenty of extra quests to delve into and character stats to max out, as well as a roguelike mode that adds permadeath and restricts healing. 

The update that brings it out of Early Access adds 16 cards, all of which are detailed in this Steam post, and a full post-launch roadmap is coming soon.

It's $20/£16 on Steam and GOG or slightly more expensive on the Humble Store. You can try a free demo by clicking here.

We first played Book of Demons in mid-2016, just before sitting down with its creator at PAX West, who said it was born of a desire to distill Diablo down to its purest form. Which came as no surprise, it immediately reminded us of Diablo, albeit far cuter. It's been trucking along in Steam Early Access ever since, and recently received a big update which added the rogue, the last of its three classes.

With the addition of rogues, Book of Demons has completed its high fantasy class trilogy. Where mage does magic things and warrior does tanky things, the rogue is described as a flexible class with long- and close-range options thanks to her bow and daggers. 

Like mage and warrior, rogue also has unique class cards—16 to be exact. Book of Demons' combat works on a deck system: the cards you include become the skills you can use while dungeoneering. This plays into its procedurally generated dungeons, as you'll likely never build the same deck or run the same dungeon twice. You can sample the cards for yourself in the free demo available on Steam. 

Developer Thing Trunk says Book of Demons will exit Early Access in mid-2018. Before it does, the studio says it will receive eight major updates including Mac support, improved sound, more cards and new game modes like an offline challenge mode. 

I first played Book of Demons when it launched on Steam Early Access about a month ago and it immediately reminded me of Diablo. It has deck building elements and a papercraft art style, but the hack-n-slash dungeon crawler roots showed clearly through. So when I spoke with the developer of Book of Demons at PAX West this weekend, it wasn t surprising to hear that the game came out of a desire to recreate Diablo in its simplest, most accessible form. Watch the video above to hear our full conversation.