Last updated on December 15th, 2025 at 11:07 pm
Indies' Lies – Card Game Review
Indies' Lies is a Card/Strategy game from QI YU SG. PTE. LTD., first launched in 23rd September 2021.
It’s rated 12+ and currently has 439+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Indies' Lies Stand Out
Major Event – DLC Discount Begins!!
Legend has it that the old gods were the source of creation.
Lord God Strockanos, the god of the universe, created the Mekaa continent out of chaos and formlessness. He poured his own blood into this land, underneath its thick crust of rocks. The gods of agriculture, destiny and death are all guardians of Mekaa, and the source of arcane magic. Therefore God´s Blood and arcane magic form the essentials of life in this world.
Over the years, humans have become the "lords of all things" in Mekaa, from the original ancient clan of the Alrayans, the migrating Elruips, to the Normaasts who were "exiled" to the end of the world. Humanity has developed a variety of civilizations among mountains, on plains, or in the form of nomad tribes. Although there were conflicts between civilizations and different religions over time, the belief in the old gods, mainly Strockanos, has remained dominant.
However, the advent of the "new god" Indies introduced to Mekaa a new faith, and a new "era" for the whole continent and human civilization.
ABOUT THE GAME
Indies' Lies is a single-player game that combines deckbuilding with Roguelike and RPG elements. It features procedurally generated maps, diverse talent/rune/partner mechanics, and hundreds of cards for different classes to ensure a refreshing experience each run. Indies’ Lies also has a thick plot set in a medieval fantasy world, with story adventures for each character.
GAME FEATURES
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Fun for Beginners, Depth for the Experienced
With the hope to introduce the fun of the deckbuilding strategy to more players, we have adjusted and optimized traditional deckbuilding mechanics to create a smoother and more beginner-friendly gameplay. Meanwhile, more experienced players will find gameplay less restrictive yet challenging enough.
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Take 9 Characters with Unique Traits on a Roguelike Journey
Indies’ Lies now has 9 playable characters from 3 classes: Wizards, Rangers and Mechanists, with each character coming with a unique set of cards and talents. It will be a different journey each time on the procedurally generated maps, where you pick different cards, learn different talents, encounter different events and enemies. Explore the possibilities and find your favorite strategy!
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A Partner System to Spice it Up
Indies’ Lies puts you in command of a team of 1 hero and up to 2 partners. There are over 10 partners, all with distinctive cards and strengths. You can match the hero deck with hundreds of partners’ cards to try different tactics. Instead of acting as a mere tank, the partner brings on more room for flexible strategies and team tactics. -
Craft Your Talent Tree
A unique talent tree is procedurally generated for each run, and talents were designed to suit different classes and builds. There are over 200 talents in total, designed to meet the need for deck development at different stages and for different builds. -
Explore a Medieval Fantasy World
Step into Mekaa, a world caught in the clashes of Gods. By collecting clues for each character, you can unlock each story mode and dive into their quests, whether it is chasing a lost love, fighting the Seven Nightmares, or finding the culprit behind Mekaa’s fall into this dark frenzy.
Follow us on
Twitter: https://twitter.com/IndiesLies
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IndiesLies
Discord: https://bit.ly/IndiesLiesDiscord
This Card game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Indies' Lies is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 21st August 2025
Recent improvements include:
DLC Discount
Download & Availability
Indies' Lies is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
Had a really bad impression of card games and roguelike stuff in general but this is actually pretty fun. We like the art style and mechanics. Definitely recommend.
Why do you devs insist on ruining good character designs buy constantly adding new ugly pieces to each outfit to cover the female characters up even more? So pathetic honestly. Wont get more money from us. Plenty of other games that dont have some weird agenda.
It seems like the game is mostly complete but there are a few bugs where an effect does not do what it should. For example a card that should 'activate' a unit twice only does so once. These bugs are somewhat common but surprisingly do not really bring the game down nearly as much as you might think.
Great game but when we watch an ad for perks, the game screen is moved to one side or the screen is black and we cannot continue. Have to restart the game but then have to rewatch the ad. Ad is useless pretty much. Still great game but this is a bug.
But theres a glitch. Wherever there is a ad it never ends. The screen just goes black and Im stuck staring at the screen. Until we exit and restart the game, just fit it to repeat.
This is one if the best Slay the Spirelikes on mobile. The UI is changed from PC to be better for mobile and $3 to remove all ads and get a DLC pack is VERY fair. Diversity in character builds is so fun and we love how overpowered you feel while enemies still give challenge at those overpowered states. The game improves with every update.
Great game with unexpected depth, real gem.
Great game play but when the ads finish, the screen blacks out and we have to restart the gameso we dont get the loot and have to replay fights Ive already won.
We want to give this game a higher rating. Its a fun take on Slay the Spire. But the ads served before each boss are so broken the game has to be fully closed and reopened to continue playing. Also the grammar is just not great. Generally thats not a huge deal, but it often makes mechanics hard to understand.
If youve played Slay the Spire, youve played this but in a much, much better and far more optimized form. This game is a direct rip of StS, sometimes down to even the names of certain card mechanics. Except this game is not balanced, the grammar is a bit all over the place and confusing at times, and the strategy is much, much shallower. The steampunk Hearthstone-esque artwork, while nothing original, is pleasant. If you have Apple Arcade, Slay the Spire is free and 100% worth it. Indies Lies is almost passable for someone wanting that experience but cant pay for anything at all. We say ALMOST because once an advertisement pops up, the game will no longer load and you will have to force quit the app and cross your fingers that your progress was saved. Tl;dr: Slay the Spire rip with Hearthstone skin. Bad grammar that can result in gameplay issues, lack of deep strategy, and game-breaking bug following advertisements prevent us from recommending this to anyone. Get an Apple Arcade trial and play Slay the Spire+.
Great deck building roguelike. Only thing that we would want to improve would be the English translation.
This is a very well made game. If you liked Slay the Spire, youll like this.
Very comparable to slay the spire with way more content. Removing ads only costs 3 dollars and comes free with DLC. Highly recommend.
The game had an update in the last few months that makes playing the game post ads impossible. For example, if we want to claim an item reward after some battles we must watch an ad. The ad moves and resizes the window when redirected to the App Store. If you are lucky enough to click the x to get back to the game, the window is only partially viewable and can no longer be interacted with requiring a restart. The worst part is, you still get no reward benefit and would need to watch the ad again leading back to the bug. The game is otherwise great, but the ads (especially with this bug) absolutely kill the joy for us.
Best mobile roguelike since Dawncaster. Its cheap to get rid of ads and the dlc is substantial for the cost. Im excited to play this game for years to come.
Deep, tons of different strategies, the depth could be deeper or the levels longer but maybe later, wish there was a multiplayer or and endless mode.maybe later.
This is exactly the same as Slay the Spire, but better AND free.
The only complaint Ive got is that the translation/grammar seems a bit off. Otherwise this game is AMAZING. Ive been looking for a good deck-building game and one with an interesting skill tree too. This has it all. Great gameplay, both for beginners and those looking for a challenge. Ads are manageable and not even required to watch plus you can get rid of them if you pay for the DLC, which is very well priced for the amount of content. All in all, fantastic game.
This game takes Slay the Spire and goes beyond. We love STS, but after hundreds of hours of it, Indies is a delightful progression. It feels like a worthy sequel to SLS with the same core gameplay, but interesting innovations and an impressive story mode. Being free to play, we highly recommend a Spire fan check it out and the DLCs are worth the very reasonable price.
Spectacular game. Fully enjoying this as a wonderful deck building rpg. 5/5.
We absolutely LOVE this game. Ive been working on developing our own game for our Energy/MAXED Co-Manga that Ive published this year and we were working on a gaming concept for it and this is the style of gameplay we were going for! We hope you guys continue to build this game up because we really do love it, Id love a survival mode that goes on for 100 floors and you eventually get to build a team of 5 throughout and to see how far you can really go.
At first we thought this was a shameless copy of slay the spire, but they do admit that they were inspired by it. There is so much more going on here that it is definitely its own thing, and deserves all five stars. It goes without saying that if you are a fan of slay the spire you will like this too.
We figure this must be a translation or make by brilliant small children, because the grammar is horrible and the card mechanics are confusingly worded, but the game is amazing. It's pretty close to slay the spire, which we paid like 20$ for on three seperate platforms. This game is free and we think it's a better game. If you want to unlock the whole story you can pay for the DLCs (3$ a pop) and once you pay for the first one you can turn off the ads, but you may not want to, you only watch ads to gain a benefit. Really, the game is 5/5 with or without paying for it. We were really impressed by it. Our wife and we have been sick for weeks and we must have sunk 70 hours or more into it so far, and we don't think we'll be slowing down anytime soon. Which brings us to our one complaint, we have been playing Daniels roguelike to unlock his story for about 30 hours. He's not our favorite character, but we're a completionist and we want to unlock his story to unlock his optional starting talents. We take every ? We can and make it impossible to encounter enemies half the time. And we have not seen Funky Brew quest prompt yet. At this point either we have the worst rng imaginable or its broken. If it's broken please fix.
We love this game Ive been looking for a card game rogue like and this have been a great gem.
Its a neat take on deckbuilding. A bit on the easy side if you have experience with the genre, but genuinely interesting mechanics. Been playing it for free for many hours, but will be purchasing the DLC today to support the devs.
We understand that we need to watch a few ads, but about 40% of the time when we finish the ad, and Im taken back to the game, theres a graphics error. The game is no longer full screen, but instead its crammed in a small window and unplayable. We must restart our pad to get the game back. When we start again, Im not given the credit for watching the ad and we have to do it again and hope the same thing doesnt happen. Frustrating.
Mechanically this is a nice deck builder with plenty of depth and content to keep it engaging. The art and polish are impressive and it has enough originality and distinction from other games in the genre to earn a spot on our tablet. But the translation to English is so unwieldy it gets in the way of the experience. The tooltips, card text, and lore references make it hard to know whats going on, both due to grammar and word choice and also some flat out bizarre associations between one thing and another. For instance the Event nodes always come with some quote from the game worlds historical archives that seems completely out of context with the event its supposed to illuminate. Im sure these references make perfect sense in the developers native culture, but that sense is utterly lost in translation. (What are all these camps?) This continual weirdness makes a well designed and beautifully produced game feel confusing and disjointed to play. Just one good localization pass could fix this completely if done by someone with the proper linguistic and cultural comprehension. Id like to see that because this is a really nice game that deserves to succeed.
Cant purchase dlcs with apple gift card, game requires us to have a credit card to buy it whereas we can buy other games and dlcs with gift cards only.
This is a vary fun game and doesnt take long to learn our only complaint is that there is only three characters you can play unless you buy the DLC.
We dont mind this that much, but to unlock every hero and location you have to pay 6$ in total. An in-game currency that can allow you to unlock new heroes would be a good substitution for that. Also, the translation is still really bad despite all of the reviews complaining about it. The lore is completely unintelligible and sometimes card descriptions are confusing. Definitely try the game though.
We purchased this game a while ago, but only recently started playing. We unlocked all DLC then updated a few days after. Now its saying we need to purchase the final DLC after we already purchased? It wont let us retrieve purchase. 4 star game otherwise. 1 star off for forcing us to rebuy a DLC.
40% of our screen is blank because you cant make this full screen? Really.
To keep things inline with the game, Ill leave a review if you watch this add.
Game type is not a reason to rate your down. Roguelike is a nice way to have fun. There are many great roguelike games before and others are just copy them but have even worse footage. UI not bad. Characters not fit with background. Everything are just not match. Looks like all your game company are just drag some pictures together and make it to a game. Then the game through are wired. The enemy are just not doing any thing threaten. Some of them just do nothing for a round. May the assistence role is a only nice try of this game. But guess what? A assistance have a whole deck of combo but while in assistance he can not combo cus he only have one card of combo.
Needs some translation touch ups but amazing game to play. Really fun card interactions.
First, lets get this out of the way. We think its better than Slay the Spire! The cards and strategies are varied and interesting and there is personality and heart put into all the cards and characters. We love just how many interesting combinations there are to find and its always such a joy to find infinite-combos and other broken strategies. The monetization is one of the best Ive seen in a game. We dont ever risk purchasing (somewhat obscure) mobile games so we were glad to be able to play a good slice of the game for free (with some optional ads). Only knowing what we know now we would have happily paid for a game like this. Ive purchased all 3 expansions/dlc and they are each totally worth it and makes for a complete game (and lets you turn off ads entirely). If there are ever any additions made we would like to see more experimental game modes such as one allowing a pre-constructed deck or one that mixes class cards together and definitely a never-ending game mode would be great too.
Bought all dlc to support the devs please keep supporting updates to it.
Really good, fun, and fair price for content.
Over the course of the past year we bought all the expansions for this game. Every character has such a unique play style that its definitely worth the fixed price.
This game is amazing! -Just the right amount of RNG. -Great characters & enemies with a great art style. -a lot of difficulty even with the first initial levels. If you are a fan of STS (Slay The Spire) we whole heartedly recommend this game and even believe it is better in many aspects. -Winning feels rewarding for the difficulty it brings to the table. Give it a shot, you wont be disappointed! Maybe after losing over and over but hey trial and error.
Amazing game with really fun gameplay and a nice visual style. Evokes the fun of sts, but does enough differently to make it its own experience. It has very few ads, and they can be removed by buying any of the $3 dlcs, which we will definitely be doing. Good game + player friendly monetization = 5 stars. Take notes other devs ;).
Ive probably put 1000+ hours into slay the spire so we downloaded this game to scratch the itch on mobile and learn some new mechanics. Our first time playing was awesome, we played a couple hours of the first characters scenario and (despite not understanding some text/new mechanics) we thought this game was great! The next time we tried to play it just gave us a network error whenever it tried to start. Im still able to access other apps and the internet so Im not sure what its on about. We even tried using a vpn, reinstalling, etc. But it just tells us we need to be connected to the network to start the game. Im disappointed! We definitely wanted to get deeper into this game. If it works for you Id recommend checking it out.
Its pretty good actually. Ads arent overwhelming. Complex and deep game Edit: This game went from a 5 to a 0 because of one thing. Misfired skill. Completely destroys the flow of the game. They just randomly hit your Hero with a move loss. Bad developers create bad gameplay. And this is garbage gameplay. They might as well just kill you instantly without telling you why. Same effect. Deleted.
Good game but, we downloaded this for a flight. Unfortunately if u arent constantly connected to the internet, the game will not work. Ads during gameplay is soo tacky and scummy. Could be a great game but the devs made some silly choices making it another garbage iPhone game to play when u are bored.
Great game, pretty cool combos to build. Artsyle is neat. Ads arent intrusive and the vast majority are optional(and often worth the in game rewards).
We really enjoyed this game! Are there any plans to make a iPad version? The game does expand to fit the screen, but the resolution is a little off. Id definitely purchase stuff if/when this happens.
So far, Im having fun. This game is a great example of how to take inspiration from excellent deckbuilders in the genre and improve/add new systems. The game feels like a mix of the Vault of the Void map system, along with the Slay the Spire events. However, this is so much more than just a copy. They have a cool system that replaces the relic system of Slay the Spire with a semi-random talent pool that you unlock by challenging difficult enemies, which we really like. It also has a cool partner system, where you gain a buddy after each act and they act as both an energy relic and a specialized mini-deck that is added into your deck. Also, when you add cards into your deck, you can just replace cards in your deck instead of searching for removal. Really great mechanic that has allowed us to have fun with tiny decks, and it makes card removal events feel like an actual choice. Ads only pop up before boss fights, and are tastefully scattered in shops and rewards to block the more powerful consumables. Great stuff all around so far, we are definitely considering purchasing the full version to support the devs.
An easy comparison to Slay the Spire, but IL has a better sense of difficulty and vulnerability. Not a lot of immediate or obvious broken combos, in fact, youll find some struggles trying to pass various difficulties on some characters. With the download and DLC spend.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 2.0.6
- Size: 1,729.35 MB
- iOS: 12.0 or later
- Languages: EN, ZH, ZH
- Content Advisory: Infrequent/Mild Simulated Gambling, Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content and Nudity
- Developer: QI YU SG. PTE. LTD.
Last updated: 21st August 2025 | Genre: Card, Strategy | Developer: QI YU SG. PTE. LTD.