The Veil tore on a Tuesday. The dead stopped staying dead. And Aldric — Sage of the Veil, hiding from his past in a quiet mortician's job — is the only one still on shift.

GRAVEYARD SHIFT: A SAGE'S LAST STAND is a dark pixel-art roguelike deckbuilder where the dead on your table become the deck in your hands. Survive twenty-one nights of escalating horrors, forge your cards toward their final Ascended forms, and find out what's been waiting behind the Veil the whole time.

Every Corpse Is a Choice

Each night begins at the intake table, and every body is a decision:

• Embalm — a clean card, no strings attached.

• Harvest — render it down for something rarer.

• Full Release — sever the soul completely and open a booster pack of possibilities… but the Veil remembers every door you open.

Some corpses arrive possessed. Confront what's inside and win, and a Legendary soul may fight beside you for the rest of the run. Lose, and it joins tonight's wave.

And some souls give more than a card. Rarely, a Generous Soul spills ten across the table and lets you keep four — rarer still, a Gambler's Soul deals ten face-down and dares you to flip three and live with whatever you find.

Six Families of Power

Build across 135 handcrafted cards spanning six schools — brutal Vengeance, gambling Chaos, patient Wisdom, rotting Plague, forbidden Veil, and Mystery cards whose true effects stay hidden until the first time you dare to play them. Chain the right cards and one of 67 named combos detonates across the screen — with a score multiplier that rewards style as much as survival.

Let It Rot

Not every deck kills quickly. Stack Poison, Bleed and Burn on a body and it dies on its own time — then Virulence swells everything already eating the creature by half again, and Volatile Fuel pours on what's still burning. Afflictions wear a mark on the enemy so you can always read what's killing it, and the biggest horrors in the game are the ones that give a slow build the most turns to work.

The Veil Keeps a Ledger

The Veil is the deep end of the pool — the widest school in the game, home to most of the Legendary companions, and the one that deals in draw, damage and control all at once. The fastest way in is Full Release: sever a soul, open its pack. But the Veil remembers every door you open — release too many souls in a row and the debt comes due mid-run, when the next thing through the tear arrives twice as strong. Power is never free. It isn't even cheap.

Forge Every Card to Its Final Form

Cards aren't static — they're a ladder. Every card climbs a six-star rank track of real, hand-authored upgrades that rewrite its numbers, its cost, and eventually its whole effect. Push a Legendary companion to the top and it goes Ascended: a silver-electric form with an evolved signature ability. Kaelen fires her beam twice. The slime grows a crown. Find the rest.

Twenty-One Nights. Three Wardens. One Secret.

Each week ends at a boss that rewrites the rules — the Coroner mirrors your strikes, the Plague Doctor infects the very cards in your hand, and the Gravewarden raises your kills against you across three escalating phases. Eighty kinds of dead stand between you and the dawn, and the nights themselves turn against you: omens that reshape the rules after dark, elite waves, and things that were never meant to have names. Survive all three weeks, and the Veil finally shows you what it has been hiding.

Between the Nights

• Upgrade the morgue itself — four tiers of permanent tools that carry across every run, the last of them sealed until you've survived all three weeks.

• Fill the Collection: every card, all 67 combos, 18 lore notes, 30 trophies, and your highest-scoring shifts.

• Play with mouse or controller — full Steam Input support swaps every on-screen prompt to your gamepad's own buttons the moment you pick it up, and it's tuned for the Steam Deck.

The dead are patient. Your shift starts at dusk.