Loop Hero is a lot of things: an RPG, a roguelite, a car battler, a card game, a city builder, an evocative visual novel. It’s excellent too, and I can’t stop playing.
Developed by Four Quarters (creator of the brilliant 2015 behavioral experiment Please don’t touch anything) and out today on Steam, the aptly titled Loop Hero you’ll see a warrior lead along a circular path as they fight various creatures, collect upgrades and earn craft resources. Plagued by amnesia, you try to rebuild a world thrown into chaos by an evil lich. Each expedition in the random loop will help you unlock more gear and collect more materials to rebuild a village, the survivors of which will in turn give you more bonuses the next time you venture into the void. It sounds simple and repetitive, and on a very basic level it is, but it’s extremely satisfying and full of interesting trade-offs to navigate. There is also a twist: you are the one who gets to decide how each new loop takes shape.
The enemies you fight with drop cards. These are placed on the map to add new locations as if you were playing a traditional city builder, except instead of trying to create a thriving community the goal is to create a dungeon that has the upgrades and resources you can earn maximizes without killing outright. you. You can play cards like mountains and meadows to improve your health and collect craft supplies, while an aristocratic mansion summons vampires to fight. The tougher the monsters, the better the rewards, until you eventually build your loop enough to summon the boss. You can fight it to advance the story and unlock the next loop, or you can retire to your village with the things you’ve already earned.
Either way, everything you have earned in the current cycle, outside of craft supplies, will disappear. Starting every cycle may sound like a barrier, but in my experience it is liberating, allowing me to experiment with new strategies and correct past mistakes. Progress is fickle. Sometimes it happens in fits and starts. Sometimes it is completely wiped out. In Loop Hero this means slowly falling back towards death, then bouncing back furiously after getting lucky in a powerful new item or leveling up a timely manner that unlocks a new ability that just so happens to be in perfect synergy with your existing gear.
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It’s all a lot with Loop Hero‘s bigger story about humanity trying to make its way back out of obscurity. No one in the game knows exactly what will happen, 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, spending a great deal of your time completing variations on the same few tasks over and over again. In Loop Hero it feels particularly suggestive.
An ominous chiptune soundtrack infuses its minimalist, pixelated world with a grim yet whimsical energy. The music ramps up and starts to rock when you get to the end of each run, but then resets during narrative interludes as your amnesiac protagonist tries to figure out what’s going on as all-consuming darkness reveals the meaning and it. existence threatens to obliterate. “Eternity will grind you to dust, and I’m just a little acceleration in that process,” the lich tells you at one point. I’ve felt this way about a lot of loot-based games, but not Loop Hero
While Loop Hero is an apocalyptic game, it is both about reconstruction in the face of depression and despair and about survival. Rather than simply trying to increase the numbers, or grind down the loot needed to grind for even better loot, I’d like to sign up for this war on the precipice to help the characters come out of their cosmic malaise . There may not be some profound philosophical treatise on nihilism in the loop in the end, but as we turn the corner on the one-year anniversary of the pandemic, I have already discovered Loop Hero‘s portrayal of people struggling lowkey to overcome their boredom and despair, surprisingly striking.
After several hours of playing, I only beat the third boss. I’d like to see it to the end though, both to find out what new combinations of cards and skills I can use to survive the loop, and to see if the conclusion of Loop Hero‘s story responds to the intriguing mysteries it sets out at the outset.