Burn With Me is a hand-drawn demon card game that features the artist's own hand and is a refreshingly finite alternative to Balatro-like games.

Background: A Hand-Drawn Occult Puzzler With a Literal Human Touch

Burn With Me is a hand-drawn game, and the most prominent non-hand-drawn element in it is artist Eva Manuilovich's own right hand. That hand appears on the right side of the screen throughout each match ritual, dealing cards with a flick of the index finger. When you beat the target score, it gives you a thumbs-up, then reaches languidly toward the card you've won.

The game is a card puzzler and battler that plays out as a series of occult university students performing forbidden sorcery. Overseeing them is a lupine lecturer who, as the source puts it, is definitely going to get hauled before the PTA one of these Halloweens.

How a Match Works: Pentagrams, Vials, and Adjacency Tricks

Each level consists of a pentagram. You must place five creature cards around that pentagram to fill a vial with spiritual energy.

Every card has a base points value, but base points alone won't get you far. You need to exploit modifiers, starting with simple adjacency effects. One example is an Ursus card that gets a boost if placed next to exactly one other card. By contrast, a froggo card gets a boost if it has no neighbours when played, so it should be played first.

The possibilities stack up quickly. In the demo, the player soon had a pufferfish card that inflated and deflated every time it was played, with its value increasing and decreasing accordingly. That pufferfish was used to win an octopus that permanently raised the value of adjacent cards.

The Core Conceit: Burn a Card, Draw a Card

It's wise to play your best cards early in the rite so you can make effective use of Burn With Me's headline conceit: the ability to draw a random new card by incinerating a random card in your hand.

There's also a sanity vial that lets you store any excess points from a win, granting you a reserve.

Story and Scope: Roughly a Dozen Battles per Student

While the game may not be a build-crafter on par with Balatro, Steam reviews suggest it will last around 6-8 hours or so, and it has some decent chemistry. Unlike Balatro, it has a story. Each chapter is a dredging of a particular student's soul, laying bare their sinful desires over around a dozen battles.

What This Means for Players

Burn With Me mixes a hand-drawn aesthetic, occult university framing, and a card-burning mechanic that forces early decisions about which cards to spend and which to keep. The sanity vial adds a reserve system on top of the pentagram placement and adjacency modifiers. For players who want a shorter, story-driven card battler rather than an endless build-crafter, the reported 6-8 hour length and chapter-based structure are the key details to weigh.