Walking Between The Worlds

Getting Started With Walking Between The Worlds

Walking Between The Worlds is a roguelike deckbuilder that came out around 2024. You play as someone moving through different realms, building a card deck as you go. It borrows heavily from games like Slay the Spire and Monster Train, but adds a shifting battlefield mechanic where the map layout actually changes between encounters. The combat is turn-based, cards have synergies, and there are relic effects that stack in interesting ways. It's decent. Not groundbreaking, but solid if you're looking for something with more movement than the usual grid-based dungeon crawler. I picked it up on a weekend sale and burned through the entire first run in about four hours. Here's what I actually learned after putting time into it.

Downloading and Installing Walking Between The Worlds

The game is available on Steam. You can grab it for around $15 to $20 depending on the region and current sales. There's also a standalone client on their website if you want to skip the launcher, but the Steam version is the more stable build in my experience. Patch notes are inconsistent, so the Steam version gets fixes faster. If you're on console, it hit PlayStation and Xbox a few months later. The game supports controller and keyboard input equally well, though the UI is a bit cramped on console when you have a large hand deck. System requirements are low. Integrated graphics will run it fine at 60fps on lower settings. I ran it on a laptop with a Ryzen 5 and 16 gigabytes of RAM without any issues.

How the Core Loop Works

You select a character class at the start. There are currently four: the Void Walker, the Realm Knight, the Echo Healer, and the Rift Mage. Each has a distinct resource system. The Void Walker uses a shift meter instead of traditional energy. The Realm Knight uses stamina that regenerates per floor. The Echo Healer plays cards in pairs that reference each other. The Rift Mage manipulates the battlefield grid itself. I'm partial to the Rift Mage because the grid manipulation lets you control positioning, but that's just me. Between maps, you choose your next route. Unlike most games in this genre where the map is static, Walking Between The Worlds reshuffles nodes between encounters. You might pick a path that looks safe, then realize halfway through that a combat node has relocated next to an elite encounter. This is the game's signature feature, and honestly it makes planning routes genuinely hard rather than memorizing a fixed layout. When you win a fight, you pick a card reward. Sometimes it's a new card, sometimes it's a relic, and occasionally it's a health restore or gold. The card pool is roughly 120 unique cards across all classes, which means runs feel different from each other but you'll eventually see the same powerful cards multiple times. Relic combinations are where the game gets interesting. Stacking three specific relics together can create broken synergies that make the late game trivial.

Practical Tips From Actual Play

Don't hoard gold early. New players tend to save currency for the shop in the second half, but shops appear frequently and the card rotation in each shop is actually one of the few things that resets. If you see a card you want, buy it. Waiting usually means it's gone. The shift mechanic on the Void Walker class is easy to overlook. Every card you play advances the shift meter, and when it fills you get a free action. This means cards that cost zero or have reduced cost become significantly more valuable than they appear on paper. I ran a build around two-cost removal cards and a relic that reduced costs by one, which let me effectively play four actions per turn in the late game. That run took under twenty minutes from start to boss. Here's something the tutorials don't tell you: the enemy deck preview you see before a fight is not always accurate. There's a hidden mechanic called realm distortion that can alter enemy draws after you commit to a path. I learned this the hard way during a run where I avoided an elite because its preview showed two heal cards and a shield buff. Once I engaged it, the distortion kicked in and the enemy had completely reloaded its draw pile with offense cards. I died quickly. After that, I stopped reading the preview as gospel and started treating it as a rough estimate.

Common Mistakes That Cost Me Runs

Picking too many high-cost cards early is the most common error. A five-cost card sounds powerful, but if your energy or shift meter doesn't support it by floor four, it becomes dead weight in your deck. I've seen people build decks with an average card cost above three and wonder why they're struggling in the mid-game. Aim for an average cost below two-five for the first thirty cards you add. Another mistake is ignoring the battlefield positioning. The Rift Mage class specifically benefits from understanding tile control. Most players treat the grid as decorative. It isn't. Certain cards interact with tile types, and enemies can be pushed or pulled. Learning to manipulate the board state instead of just playing cards at enemies will double your survival rate in elite fights. The game has a difficulty toggle called Nightmare Mode, which unlocks after beating the final boss on normal. It doubles enemy HP and adds a second modifier per floor, like "enemies draw three extra cards" or "you start each fight with a debuff." It's worth trying once you've beat the game normally, but don't jump into it expecting a fair challenge. The scaling is aggressive and certain relic combinations become significantly less effective.

What the Game Does Well and Where It Falls Apart

The shifting map mechanic is genuinely fresh for the genre and keeps runs tense. Card design is thoughtful with meaningful choices between similar cards. The art style is clean and readable during fast combat. Boss fights have distinct patterns that feel fair once you learn them. The game stumbles in a few areas. The third act is noticeably shorter than the first two, and the final boss is underdeveloped compared to earlier encounters. There's no endgame mode or daily runs, which limits replayability after you've seen the content. The shop rotation could use more variety, and some card synergies feel accidentally balanced rather than intentionally designed. I also found the soundtrack repetitive after about six hours, though that's minor compared to the structural issues. If you finish it and want something similar, Monster Train is the closest comparable in terms of depth. If you want the shifting map idea taken further, look into newer indie releases in the roguelike space. Walking Between The Worlds is a solid entry point but not the final word in the genre.