Loop Hero are many things: an RPG, a roguelite, a car fighter, a card game, a city builder, a stimulating visual novel. It’s excellent too, and I can not stop playing it.
Developed by Four Quarters (maker of 2015’s brilliant behavioral experiment Please do not touch anything) and out today on Steam, the appropriate title Loop Hero see you as a warrior shepherd along a circular path as they battle different creatures, collect upgrades, and earn artificial resources. Troubled by memory loss, you try to build a world that is thrown into chaos by an evil light. Each expedition in the random loop helps you to unlock more goods and recruit more material to rebuild a town, the survivors of which in turn offer more bonuses the next time you face the void. It sounds simple and repetitive, and on a very basic level it is, but it is very satisfying and full of interesting considerations to navigate. There is also a twist: you are the one who has to decide how each new loop will form.
The enemies you fight with drop cards. It is put on the map to add new places as if you were playing a traditional city builder, except instead of trying to create a thriving community, the goal is to create a well that has the upgrades and resources you can earn, maximize without killing. you. You can play cards like mountains and meadows to improve your health and collect artifacts, while an aristocratic mansion will summon vampires to fight. The harder the monsters, the better the reward, until you finally build up your lust enough to summon the boss. You can fight it to advance the story and unlock the next loop, or you retreat to your town with the stuff you already earned.
Either way, everything you earned in the current loop outside of the manufacturing materials will disappear. If I am forced to start each cycle anew, it may sound to some extent, but in my opinion it is liberating, which allows me to experiment with new strategies and correct mistakes in the past. Progress is a fickle thing. Sometimes it happens in pace and starts. Sometimes it is completely erased. In Loop Hero it means you slowly fall back to death to jump back furiously after climbing into a powerful new item or gaining a timely level that unlocks a new skill that can happen to work perfectly with your existing tax.
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It’s all a piece with Loop Hero‘s larger story about humanity trying to return from oblivion. No one in the game is completely sure what is happening, how many times it has happened before, or how many times it will happen again. Time can feel like a flat circle in many games, where you spend a lot of your time completing variations on the same pair of tasks over and over. In Loop Hero it feels especially enticing.
An ominous chiptune soundtrack renders its minimalist, pixelated world with a gloomy yet whimsical energy. The music increases and starts to fluctuate when you get to the end of each run, but is then reset during the intervals of the story, while you try to figure out what is going on, while the darkness of the devil threatens meaning and consists of too sure. “Eternity will grind you to dust, and I’m just a little gear in the process,” the lich told you at one point. I felt that way about a lot of outdoor games, but not Loop Hero.
While Loop Hero is an apocalyptic game, it’s just as much about rebuilding depression and despair as it is about surviving. Instead of just raising the numbers or grinding the loot needed to grind for even better loot, I would like to call this war to the abyss to help its characters get out of their cosmic ailment. There may not ultimately be a deep philosophical dissertation on nihilism, but if we turn to the one-year anniversary of the pandemic, I have already found Loop Hero‘s portrayal of low-key people struggling to overcome their dangers and despair.
After playing for a few hours, I just beat the third boss. However, I am eager to see it through to the end, both to find out what new combinations of cards and abilities I can use to survive the loop, and to see if the conclusion of Loop Hero‘s story conforms to the intriguing mysteries it sets out at the beginning.