The trailer blew my mind. I’m not a Horror fan at all, but the graphics are straight out of DOS games from my childhood and the soundtrack absolutely SLAPS. The album is on bandcamp and the first track give me massive Donut Ghost House vibes from Super Mario World.
To be specific, it’s build engine mechanics, with modern game ideas, in a cyberpunkish setting; so it’s got a little bit of all those things in it. It’s great!
It has gorgeous pixel art, but the gameplay is very grindy, which can be a plus or a minus depending on the player. The reviewer ultimately felt the story was somewhat compelling, the gameplay was dull, and that it become repetitive a few hours in, recommending it in short bursts.
Tldw: it’s boring and grindy. Honestly the video isn’t great.
Since I played it when it was free from epic too:
Its a game whose tediousness outstrips its interesting ideas way too quickly. There’s a loop that starts blank that the hero goes around, and the player builds the loop up over the course of a “mission” by placing things like mountains and plains and swamps. Some of these tiles spawn monsters, some help the hero, and some do both. It’s the most interesting thing in the game and also the most underdeveloped. Eventually after placing enough tiles a boss spawns and your “mission” is over and the hero goes back to camp. Technically you can keep going through loops but there’s really no point.
Camp is made up of buildings that you build out of resources collected during the loop and serves as a sort of meta progression for the game. You build things and get new cards, classes, equipment and whatnot. They’re made of tiles but much larger and less visually distinct than the loop tiles - which is super annoying because much like the loop tiles layout is important but unlike the loop that you will place a million times, you only get one camp, so any mistakes are forever. Camp Tiles are built from resources gathered doing loops, so they feed into each other in a kind of rougelite way.
The main problem with the game is that the systems are interesting but they have so much tedious stuff attached that the entire experience is bogged down. Take for instance equipment: the game gives you a stream of equipment that functionally can be different, it might buff attack speed, defense, all kinds of things. But the game gives you like hundreds of pieces of equipment per loop, and it’s all random so you wind up babysitting the equipment section of the screen all the time so that the hero doesn’t become underpowered and die, but you also can’t try for a “build” because any equipment you don’t use is slowly deleted. If you want attack speed the only thing you can do is pray to rngsus that it pops up consistently (spoiler, it won’t). Or the camp itself - eventually you unlock furniture for each house, there are a million different ones, and they’re all things like +1%hp Regen.
But by far the grind gets the most real when you start looking at how many resources you need. Certain tiles grant certain resources that are given during the loop, which is a really good way to incentive players to not get stuck in a rut when building the loop - but the math is way off, and when failing to defeat the boss means that you lose 70% of anything gathered it just adds insult to injury. It’s supposed to be a push your luck thing, but you’re only allowed to leave once a loop and loops can be fairly long and … well like everything else in this game - random.
It kinda feels like I’m just crapping on the game, but I actually think under the tedium there’s an interesting game here. The first time you find a tile interaction (of which there are far too few) is a little magical, and the plot is kind of interesting even though it’s the most overwrought sequel to the neverending story you’ll ever read. Like an annoying amount of Devolver games, this kinda feels like it would be a really good mobile game if it was somewhat streamlined.
Loop Hero feels like it’s on the precipice of being good, but the path to success with the gameplay loop is pretty hard to sus out. You do stuff, and it seems like you’re getting the pieces needed to progress, but then the game doesn’t really change at all.
Agreed that it’s fun in bursts. Worth playing for 10-20 min every few days. This isn’t like Enter the Gungeon or Slay the Spire, where you feel like you always need just one more run.
Looks cool so far; my worry is having the transformations effectively each just play like completely different, mediocre games; instead of each adding new twists to a form of core gameplay.
Of course, it’s an early trailer, so maybe I’m just not seeing enough of it.
I still have the copy I bought with some lawn mowing money in 2005. It’s aged very well. I’m excited for some of the younger folks to get to play this absolute masterpiece.
I wonder if they’ll be removing Danger Mario as a possible strat.
They remove my glass cannon build, and we take to the steets.
But I don’t think they’d change any of the core mechanics. Maybe add some side ones, like a boss rush mode, like what they added to the Mario RPG remake.
My 1-in-a-million prediction? Fast travel mechanic. Mario folds himself up into an envelope and mails himself to a town he’s already gotten a crystal star from. (Yes, I know we already have the underground pipes, just let me believe.)
It was very pretty, and initially intriguing. But in the end I found it to be one of the slowest and most boring games I have ever played. I had to force myself to get through it because it was such a slog.
damn this hits. Watching him just flip through all the voices like nothing makes me think of Charles like the Mel Blanc of our time, just holding all these wacky personalities in his head.
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