Buckle up for a roguelike deckbuilder boiling over with card mutation mischief and limitless synergies.
the fun
A la Card is what you’d get if you mashed up Balatro with Slay the Spire and you hadn’t eaten since yesterday. It's a food-truck-themed deckbuilding roguelike all about bending the rules and letting the player get weird with absurd synergies.
Slap the effect of one card on another. Change what triggers that effect in the first place. Swap stats, colours, flavours, you name it. You're guaranteed to discover things no one else will.
The game loop is an ebb and flow of cramming as many calories as possible into the window before retreating into your truck to cook up the most broken combinations you can conscion.
These people want food? Oh you'll give them food.
But it won't be enough to just make a really big burger. Zany bosses bring self-contained puzzles to navigate, testing your deck's flexibility. They'll slip you a card and refuse to leave until you serve it to them, or clog the window with half-eaten scrap. You'd better be able to improvise.
With hundreds of cards and no shortage of mid-run events, game-changing trinkets, and wacky opportunities, no two runs are ever the same.
the facts
Official Title: A la Card
Developer: Shook Loose
Platform: Steam
Genre: Roguelike Deckbuilder
Players: Single-player
Demo Release: 24/02/2025
Full Release: Q3 2025
features
Sequence your cards to make the most of their effects. Don't draw before you've buffed the top card of your deck, and don't buff it before putting exactly the card you want to strengthen on top!
Combine the stats of your ingredients using powerful recipes, creating space for even more food at the same time!
After each meal, decide between adding new cards to your deck or unlocking the effects of the ones you started with.
Random special events provide opportunities to change each and every detail of your cards: the colours, stats, effects, how you trigger those effects, and more!
Each starting deck has a unique and powerful trinket that deeply impacts how it plays, and you'll find more trinkets to mix and match throughout your runs.
Presiding over each location is a memorable boss with a unique ability. When big numbers aren't enough, you'll have to get clever!
Win runs to unlock more starting decks, trinkets, and release even more cards into the pool for future runs.
Revisit your favourite decks to take on special star challenges and prove your true mastery of the game.
About us
Shook Loose is a two-person studio based in Ontario, Canada. After our jam game, Some Munnings, took 1st place in Humor in Ludum Dare 55, we realized we could wield our weirdness for larger projects. A la Card combines our love of deckbuilders with our addiction to street food to deliver a roguelike experience for the fun-forward palate.
Ash is an illustrator and jack-of-all-trades creative. While earning her B.A. in Film at UC San Diego, she received department honors for her thesis project, an animated documentary about pervasive memories, and helped introduce an animation-specific class to the curriculum. As an associate producer and development designer for multi-million dollar reality tv productions, she wrote, edited, and animated for various shows. Thanks to her many hungry years in Los Angeles, she has a sacred reverence for all things food truck.
SoBad has been designing and programming games since 2017, collecting multiple top-3 game jam finishes along the way. As a writer, he's been a semifinalist in the PAGE International Screenwriting Awards for Comedy and a quarterfinalist for Drama. As co-host of the When Does it Get Fun? podcast, he interviewed wonderfully creative indie developers and learned all he could muster. Then he learned some more! Most importantly, he can absolutely eat more than you — don't even try.
Questions, concerns, think you can best SoBad in an eat-off?
Contact us!
shooklooseofficial@gmail.com
