Loop Hero it’s a lot of things: an RPG, a roguelit, a self-fighter, a card game, a city builder, an evocative visual novel. It’s also great and I can’t stop playing.
Developed by Four Quarters (creator of the brilliant 2015 behavioral experiment Please don’t touch anything) and today on Steam, appropriately titled Loop Hero he sees you grazing a warrior along a circular path as he fights various creatures, collects upgrades and gains craft resources. Finding the loss of memory, try to rebuild a world thrown into chaos by an evil lich. Each random loop expedition helps you unlock more things and accumulate more materials to rebuild a village, whose survivors, in turn, give you more bonuses the next time you venture into the void. It sounds simple and repetitive, and at a very basic level it is, but it is extremely satisfying and full of interesting navigable trade-offs. There is also a twist: you are the one who decides how each new loop will take shape.
The enemies you fight are throwing cards. These are placed on the map to add new locations as if you were playing a traditional city builder, except that instead of trying to create a thriving community, the goal is to create a dungeon that maximizes the updates and resources you have. you can win without killing directly. you. You can play cards such as mountains and meadows to increase your health and collect handicrafts, while an aristocratic mansion will summon vampires to fight you. The tougher the monsters, the better the rewards, until you finally build your loop enough to summon the boss. You can fight it to advance the story and unlock the next loop, or retreat to your village with the things you’ve already earned.
Either way, everything you gained in the current loop outside of handicrafts will disappear. Being forced to restart each cycle may sound like an obstacle, but in my experience it is liberating, allowing me to experiment with new strategies and change past mistakes. Progress is an unstable thing. Sometimes it happens in shape and it starts. Sometimes it is completely erased. In the Loop Hero this means sliding slowly to death, only to return angrily after you have gained a strong new element or achieved a timely level that unlocks a new ability that happens to synergize perfectly with the existing charge.
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It’s all in one piece Loop Herothe broader story of humanity trying to straighten out of oblivion. No one in the game is quite sure what is happening, how many times it has happened or how many times it will happen again. Time can feel like a flat circle in a lot of games where you spend a lot of time completing variations of the same few tasks multiple times. In the Loop Hero it feels particularly evocative.
An ominous chiptune soundtrack permeates his minimalist, pixelated world with a gloomy but capricious energy. The music grows and begins to shake when you reach the end of each run, but then resets during narrative pauses, while your amnesic protagonist tries to figure out what is happening, because the darkness that consumes all threatens to erase meaning and existence. . “Eternity will grind you to dust and I’m just a little gear in this process,” Li tells you at one point. I felt this way about a lot of prey-based games, but no Loop Hero.
While Loop Hero it’s an apocalyptic game, it’s as much about rebuilding in the face of depression and despair as it survives. Rather than simply trying to increase the numbers or grind the prey needed to grind for even better prey, I am eager to enlist in this war against the abyss to help its characters get out of their cosmic malaise. There may not ultimately be a deep philosophical treatise on nihilism to hide in the loop, but as we turn the elbow of the pandemic’s one-year anniversary, we’ve already found Loop HeroThe appearance of lowkey people struggling to overcome their annoyances and despair surprisingly affecting.
After playing for a few hours, I only defeated the third boss. However, I am looking forward to seeing it to the end, both to find out what new combinations of cards and skills I can use to survive the loop, and to see if the conclusion Loop HeroHis story lives up to the interesting mysteries he exposes at the beginning.