If you have plans today, stop here. Don’t read any further, maybe be extra cautious and shut down your computer. Just in case. Because Rogue Legacy is about to eat away your day. A metroidvania/roguelike blend, this quirky adventure proves addictively satisfying, and often frustrating as hell. Get ready to die. A lot.
The name of the game is procedurally generated, which seems to have taken the indie genre by storm, with Terraria, Starbound, FTL and now Rogue Legacy implementing procedural generation to keep their games fresh after the 100th playthrough. Few jump into procedurals more eagerly and fleetingly than Rogue Legacy. Every time you die you get a new character, and a new dungeon. There is an upgrade system, but the variety of character traits is what really keeps the game interesting. This time you’re a barbarian with poor eyesight, next a giant with alzheimers, then a tiny hypochondriac. The way you play changes with every run, and in 7 hours of gameplay I rarely survived more than 10 minutes in the dungeon.
If all this sounds infuriating, guess again. Each death only sucks you in further. Losing a good character means you get to spend all the money you earned on upgrades, and losing a bad character means you get to cross your fingers and hope for a better one.
The graphics may look cheesy, the platformer genre may seem tired, and you may ask yourself what you’re doing with yet another roguelike, but give it ten minutes of gameplay and you’ll find yourself in the darkness just past midnight, parched, hungry, and wondering how you could’ve missed lunch and dinner. And then you’ll venture into the dungeon again.
Rogue Legacy is available on Steam right now for PC, Mac, and Linux.
August Freirich is a contributing author to IndieGameSource. You can also find him on Google+
