Rogue Legacy | a Review
originally published on 04/12/2022;
Hello everyone, I am the roguish G.E.M.Simov, a knight errant, here to tell you that Rogue Legacy had good ideas, and was good in concept, but then in practice it turned out to be dour.
Simple review details - I rank games on an out of 10 basis, granting up to 3 points in 3 categories, as well as a last, single point from my own self, depending on my experience with it.
Gameplay
This one is going to be a bit wordier than the ones I usually put out, which might have something to do with the fact that I really like Rogue Legacy, whilst at the same time I really dislike it. In a sense, it feels as if it is a very primeval, maybe even primordial attempt at doing a roguelike/roguelite - which is very nice, but also brings with it great deals of sorrow.
So, first things first, I feel as though there’s need to point out that Rogue Legacy came out in 2013, which is two whole years after ‘The Binding of Isaac’, which is one of the most recognizable, and most responsible for the popularization of the term ‘roguelike’, games out there. There are a few things that need to be mentioned.
Roguelikes did exist long, long before that. They were, however, very much roguelikes - which entails no retention of progression. Roguelites are the type of game we’re talking about here. Roguelites are the type of game that Rogue Legacy fits in, so that’s the key part.
Roguelites differ from Roguelikes in one way - they are roguelikes, though there is some means of persisting progression after failure, after getting a ‘game over’ screen. So, what, then, comes of this?
Rogue Legacy is a game in which the player takes control of a Knight with a few quirks and has to fight through a procedurally generated castle, with the goal being to open the big golden door, which only opens after the four bosses have been slain. However, that is quite hard to do, in part due to the horrendous implementation of the mechanics bound to the game - we’ll talk about that in detail a bit later on - and also because the bosses, as well as any enemies in the chambers leading up to said bosses, are at a certain level.
The player’s Knight, the Player Character (henceforth PC) starts off at level 0. How, then, do we increase that? Because, as one would expect, having a higher level tends to mean that you are stronger than you were at a lower level.
It does not happen through conventional means. Whereas in normal RPG (Role-Playing Game) settings one would gain experience points (which experience points contribute towards leveling up) from defeating enemies, that’s not a thing in Rogue Legacy. The other thing that characters in RPGs get from defeating enemies is gold (money). Fortunately, that’s what you MAY get when you beat an enemy in Rogue Legacy.
Then, with that gold, the Player can… Do nothing. The PC needs to die so that the Player may use the gold. That’s a bit weird, but it works. Then, finally, the Player can BUY upgrades, with each upgrade bought equaling a level gained. The Player can also buy equipment AND empower their character with runes.
And that’s the whole loop of the game. Do a ‘run’ - which entails picking a character, going into the castle, doing whatever one may, and then dying - after which you use the gold you got in that run to get some upgrades, which upgrades are meant to make your next run easier or at least better, and then repeat ad infinitum.
Conceptually, this could be good in practice. Naturally, we need more details to be able to tell whether that wound up being the case, but the fact of the matter is simple: There’s a great challenge in need of overcoming, and the way to overcome it is through constant repetition, which repetition allows you (the repeater) to grow stronger and maybe overcome the challenge at one point.
There is, also, the potential for learning. One could - could - overcome the challenge whilst remaining a level 0 character, due to the fact that this game, being a roguelike (roguelite) allows the development of skill. In fact, it does not just allow it - it encourages it. No matter how massive your statistical prowess, you are still susceptible to death if you do not play right (or at least well).
That development or maybe acquisition of skill comes from the monstrous repetition. Fortunately for you (or not), the game is balanced in such a way that whether you want it, or not, to get to a point at which you CAN beat the game (as a first-time player), you would need to have invested a very lengthy amount of time into the game.
Gold, leveling, rate of progression - those are the things I’m talking about here. They’re almost identical to the rate at which one acquires ‘skill’ in Rogue Legacy, or perhaps they are purposefully balanced in such this way, so as to allow the Player to ‘get good’ before being thrown into even more dire straits.
Let’s dial it back a bit. The upgrade system (the leveling system) is fashioned like a tree. It starts off at one spot, from which, once investing enough gold, more spots appear, which spots lead into other spots and so on. It’s like a ‘skill tree’, or a ‘talent tree’, but most appropriate would be the equation to a family tree. Of course, that is mostly conceptual and mechanical, even if the visual representation of the ‘tree’ in question in the game is very different from that.
So, we have certain upgrades which require other upgrades to be obtained. Naturally, upgrades cost gold - each costs some - and upgrades that come after other upgrades cost more than the preceding upgrades. That makes sense.
Here slides the nastiest mechanic I’ve seen in a game like this. Taking, as an example, the ‘health’ upgrade, we have 75 possible upgrades that can be made to health. The first investment costs X gold, and the second investment, which is an upgrade that requires a preceding upgrade, will cost X gold + N gold. It is, one could say, the implementation of scaling.
See, in an RPG, whenever a character kills or beats an enemy, that enemy grants them some experience points. The character needs a set amount of experience points to level up, so that means the character needs to kill a certain number of enemies. Then, when that character levels up, they suddenly require MORE experience points to level up (which is a means of provoking the player to seek out stronger enemies who will give more experience points, which will hasten the process of leveling and also keep the game/experience challenging).
Sometimes, that previous enemy, which granted the character a certain amount of experience, is made to give less experience to the character, based on the character’s level, further incentivizing the player’s engagement with stronger enemies. It is, in a sense, one of the many ways the developers of a game control the player’s actions, or at least attempt it.
In essence, growing stronger makes the act of growing stronger more difficult than it was previously. That same thing is conserved in Rogue Legacy’s leveling system - which utilizes upgrades - as the act of purchasing an upgrade is the equivalent of leveling up, and the amount of gold required to purchase the upgrade is equivalent to the experience points needed to level up. When the cost of an upgrade increases, that simulates the increase in experience points required to level up further.
So the formula would have to be X gold (value of the previous version of the upgrade) + N gold (newly added value to simulate the logarithmic growth observed in RPGs). Well, it actually isn’t. The formula is actually X gold (value of the previous version of the upgrade) + N gold (newly added value for this upgrade) + Y (value based on total number of upgrades purchased).
That’s where it gets incredibly stupid and annoying. Instead of allowing the Player the opportunity to spread their gold evenly among their options - to upgrade their health three times and their mana three times, as an example - the game takes away that option from the Player (through the imposition of this Y value) and makes it so the Player can only get three health upgrades and two mana upgrades OR three mana upgrades and three health upgrades, even if the value for the upgrades in question - when the Player initially takes a look at them in the ‘upgrade tree’ is the same.
An example - I take a look at the cost of a health upgrade. 60 Gold. I take a look at a mana upgrade. 60 Gold, too. Cool, so it’s equivalent value, because these two resources are equivalently important - health as a means of not dying and mana as a means of conserving health by dealing with enemies from a distance through the use of spells. I then upgrade my health and the value for its next upgrade is 110 (as a hypothetical). I then upgrade my health again and the value goes up to 160 gold. Okay, grand, so then to upgrade my health 3 times cost me a total of 330 gold. That’s how much my mana upgrades will cost, right?
I turn around and look at the upgrade cost for my mana, and it isn’t so. Instead of costing the 60 Gold it used to cost, it now costs 90 Gold (because I’ve leveled up 3 times, so there’s a 10 gold per level price hike). If I were to upgrade my mana, the second upgrade would cost 140 gold, and the third upgrade would cost 190 gold. So to upgrade my mana three times cost me… 420 gold.
Now, let’s take a look at the hypothetical - as mentioned, I can upgrade my health 75 times. I can do the same for my mana. That would mean that every time I’m upgrading my health, I’m adding to the cost of my mana upgrades. That cost increase becomes GREATER than the value of the mana upgrade itself as soon as I go over 6 health upgrades. I’m paying an extra 100 Gold per upgrade, or maybe an extra 1000 gold, or maybe 4000!
And what does that do? How does it improve my experience? It cheapens the value of my money and my effort - because I get LESS for MORE work - and it also slows down my growth. Comparatively, I can do a ‘run’, die, go back with 4000 gold gathered and spend it on health upgrades until I’ve increased my health by 50% of its previous value. Then, I got back in and gather 5000 gold, but I can only push my mana up to around 25% extra from its previous value, because everything just costs more. My health increases - compared to the 10 I got previously - are now limited to 3 or 4 at most.
It becomes so ridiculous that I can finish a run with 60000 gold and only get 5 or 6 upgrades, when previously I could have gotten 8 or 9 with that same amount of money, and even longer before that it would’ve been 15 or 16, and even longer before that it could’ve been 25 or 26, and so on and so forth. Does this feel good for the Player?
Does it feel good to spend thirty minutes running through the castle, collecting gold and doing one’s best not to die, just so you can get such a minuscule increase that your attack’s damage goes from 140 to 150? That’s, of course, the good runs. What of the times when the attack’s damage goes from 150 to 152? Or when it does not increase at all, because you did not get enough money, due to an unfortunate set of rooms, or a bit of a lapse in attention?
As previously stated, it is very purposefully done so that the Player becomes better at the game. In reality, it’s the Player being forced to get better by the game, otherwise the progression the Player is experiencing will grind to an even more staggering halt, and THEN we’re not gonna have any fun at all.
All in all, this is but one mechanic that leaves me boggled. Sure, it is understandable why things are the way they are, but does that make them good? Does that improve the player’s experience? I’d say that it works as a means of worsening it. The Player (a human being) feels good when they progress, when they unlock new things, when they get stronger, when the flashy lights and neat sound effects go off.
The Player does not feel good when those things are not present. The Player is taught that they get the flashy lights and famishing sound effects IF they go through a period of not feeling good, and then they can feel good. Why, then, is it that the period of feeling good winds up rarer and less poignant, and the periods of not feeling good wind up lengthier and more frequent? Could the balancing act not have been performed with that in mind? Where one can get around 20 upgrades per good run reliably, rather than only at the start of the game?
But I might be forgetting something. Ah, yes, the period of not feeling good - the ‘runs’ themselves - are what steps on my pinky. See, those periods are not meant to be periods of feeling not good, they’re meant to be periods of feeling a different type of good - of excitement, of trepidation, of anxiety and suspense, of having adrenaline pumping through one’s veins - that sort of thing.
Conceptually - very good! Actually, however, it is not, due to a number of reasons.
Reason number one: CONTACT DAMAGE!
Let me ask you this, ladies, gentlemen and bees of the N variety - how do you make the Player Character take damage? Well, the most reliable source of damage is contact damage, which comes from literally touching the guy/thing. Best used for stationary things, such as spikes or burning fires, and maybe enemies who have no other means of doing damage other than walking at the PC and slamming their body into them.
That’s grand! But then why does every single thing have contact damage? Did we not decide this was going to be a thematically fantasy game? Did we not agree that, in fantasy, mages like to stay far away from the fight and pepper people with their spells? Yes, we did? Why, then, are the mages in this game all moving at the PC with the same intensity as the enemies who can only do contact damage?
Here’s the issue. This is both a theming problem and a Gameplay problem. Sure, theming goes in Presentation, but this is something definitely connected to Gameplay. The most important thing is that it makes no sense. Why does touching the robe of this guy hurt me? Why does touching the armor of this other guy hurt me? Why does touching this skeleton make me go ‘YEOWCH!’ and recoil in agony?
There’s no good answer to that question, because there’s another question that comes in directly after, or rather in conjunction with it: “Why don’t I do contact damage?”
IF the rules of the game are such - that when things collide they take damage - why is it that only I take damage? Enemies walking on spikes take damage and die from it, just like me, but then enemies don’t trigger traps - okay, that’s themed to kinda work - though they don’t get hit by the other types of hazards which don’t make sense. I mean, the giant metal ball doesn’t have a mind with which to decide whether or not to slam into you, nor does the repeating turret firing bolts of fire get to pick who is treated as not existing (by the fire) and who is treated as being a real person.
The rules applying, only sometimes, is really stinky, because it seems as though the game is made with the intention of the same rules that apply to the Player applying to the enemies of the player. They CAN swing through walls and hit the Player, much like the player can swing through walls and hit Enemies, some spells and projectiles go through walls, much like how some spells of the Player’s go through walls.
But then the consistency of this game takes its leave. There’s the issue of contact damage - which is just unbelievably lazy and horrible in my eyes, especially when concerning enemies who have other means of attacking and doing damage to the Player. What I also dislike is the fact that contact damage does AS MUCH DAMAGE AS THE ENEMY’S NORMAL ATTACK, so it’s even more ludicrous.
I’ve been stricken by this ten-foot tall knight who wields a sword as big as me, I take 50 damage. Okay, I get it. I touch that same knight, I take 50 damage. Why? How? This makes no sense and is very silly.
If the contact damage they did was lower than the damage they do whenever they hit the Player with their actual attacks, I would not consider it a bad implementation. It’d actually be something done with a lot of thought put into it. As it currently stands, the contact damage was put into the game to prevent the Player from going through enemies for free. The Player CAN go through enemies, they just need to have suffered damage recently.
Other issues with the gameplay. The Player gains access to a ‘dash’ move quite early on in the game. Unfortunately, this dash move does not provide the player with ‘invincibility’ frames, unlike the ‘dodge roll’ from Dark Souls (which came out in 2011 and is said to have influenced the developers of Rogue Legacy). One could argue that giving the dash invincibility frames would be very counterproductive, as it would trivialize the game…
But there’s already a dash which gives the PC invincibility frames IN the game. Enter the ‘shinobi’, or rather the ‘hokage’ class, who comes with the special ability of having the highest strength in the game and doing massive damage with every hit, whilst also having the ability to dash… But with invincibility frames. It is literally the same as the dash the Player has on their disposal, but instead of going through (instead of movement) it features a ‘blink’. The PC is teleported to their destination, and thus can go through enemies.
Does that make the ‘hokage’ the best class? Well, no, what makes them the best class would be their obscene strength stat. In fact, it is incredibly trivial. Sure, it might require 5 mana per cast, but that’s such a tiny amount that it barely matters.
THEN there’s another problem. The consistency of the game keeps going to the toilet and flushing itself down the drain. Invincibility frames - we don’t want those! Except when Zombies pop up from the ground and hit you and damage you while being impossible to damage, that’s okay. The Zombies can have invincibility frames and they can hit you!
Oh, yes, of course, you have invincibility frames - after the PC takes damage, their sprite flashes for a few moments, during which time they are totally invulnerable to damage (that’s when the PC can walk through enemies). Strangely enough, the enemies ALSO have that, but it’s quite hard to notice, because the rate at which the PC attacks is so slow it never actually winds up conflicting with that.
However, one of the classes that can be played - the ‘secret’ class - gets to attack incredibly fast. So fast, in fact, that it becomes not only possible, but a regular occurrence and an actual detriment to you. I attack the enemy and my other attack is coming in and it goes through the enemy, doing no damage at all. Fantastically horrible.
Now, it is entirely possible that this is owed up to technical limitations (or it’s just the way things are programmed, since the team at Cellar Door Games was not massive, not when this game was made). However, I find that it makes me really not want to play the ‘secret’ class, due to the fact that it’s going to be that bothersome, and so it lowers the quality of the experience.
It does not end here. Consistency, once again, will be mentioned. Remember how it is not there? Let’s bring up the mages again, because those fellows are really soring me up. These fellows cast spells, as one would expect. The problematic ones create projectiles above themselves, which projectiles then shoot out. The projectiles that shoot out do not pass through walls… Except they do.
For no good reason - truly no good reason - the projectiles actually travel through walls for a tiny period of time, right after they’re launched, after which they stop doing that. The problem here is that, coupled with the mage AI which fanatically tries to go as close to the PC as possible - whether as a means of doing contact damage or just to be close to the PC, I can’t quite tell - these buggers love flying under ledges - solid walls - and casting their spells, which go over the walls and subsequently are a problem for the Player.
This is astoundingly unreasonable and inconsistent, because no matter how thin the wall is, and how close the PC is to that wall, none of the spells the Player has access to, which do not already pass through walls, have that grace period for themselves. Thus, the rules apply to the Player only, while the enemies operate with impunity for no good reason.
The issues don’t stop there, but I have the feeling that through the violent dismembering of the game that I am currently performing you, dear reader, can tell that there’s something very intriguing about it. After all, I’ve gone and gotten that in-depth on a game I’m supposedly lampooning. That is something very intriguing, and it is bound to the supposed ‘having no fun’ period I mentioned earlier.
Whilst doing a run, the Player is vulnerable, because their character is vulnerable. At the earlier stages of the game it is very possible to die in only 3 hits, and one simple mistake is enough to send the Player into a light panic that causes their character’s death. The mechanic of ‘perma-death’, the threat of having to start over again, is very engaging. It gives the illusion that THIS matters, and that it’s somehow important.
I found myself biting my lip in concentration as I played through the game, my hands and body sweating profusely and dirtying up my almost immaculate set-up. That’s indicative of something that either REALLY gets the Player going because it is deviously well done, OR it’s indicative of an addiction, a psychosis or some other form of mental disbalance. Fortunately for me, that is not the case with Rogue Legacy (League of Legends, on the other hand…) and so I feel as though this should be chalked up to the developers as a success.
They’ve managed to create a game so engaging and so captivating, with gameplay that is good enough to slightly nudge the Player towards wanting more, and that’s a lot more than most games out there actually do. There’s a vast number of titles I can list which fail at making me enjoy the moment-to-moment gameplay, instead depending on outside concepts and my own expectations or my own thoughts.
With Rogue Legacy, you almost have a perfect game… Well, not a perfect game, but a perfect synthesis of what playing a game should be. Almost.
And yet that does not free it from my wrath. In fact, it only makes my displeasure greater. Let me provide you with two last remarks before we head off to the big talking points.
First of those is that the game is JANKY. Maybe not Janky, but clunky, clumsy… There’s something very wrong with the game. It feels as though it is, and it is. The control scheme, when playing with mouse and keyboard, is horrible.
It’s incredibly counter-intuitive, and the Player does not even have enough fingers to deal with playing the game - because there are six buttons in need of pressing on that side of the keyboard, whereas the standard human comes with only five fingers - which press buttons.
However, one could say that the game was meant to be played with a controller… And the same applies for that control scheme, too! Why would the main button (the one for attacking) be the square?(bear with me, I’ve a PlayStation controller that I use, but the equivalent on an xBox controller would be the X button).
That might be coming from me being used to the Circle button, rather than the Square, being the main button. I say that because I’ve played a vast plenitude of games on a console, and that’s the case for most of them. In addition to that, why are the dash buttons the… The bumpers? The lower ones rather than the upper ones, the ones that require more juice to push (or so it feels)?
Either way, this can be solved through the easily performable control remapping - very good work on that, fantastic stuff, we need more good controls options like that! What can’t be solved, however, is the horrendous nature of the ‘down’ attack.
There are two types of down attack - one of them is the ‘press the button pointing down and while doing that press the attack button’, while the other is the ‘press the down button and the game will context sensitive it away’.
Both suck, in part because the down attack has a very narrow hitbox (comparatively smaller than that of the PC), because there’s no means of accelerating the speed at which the PC is descending, because it is unbearably clunky due to the fact it does not allow you to easily transition into a normal attack, and because it sometimes does not work… Most of the time.
The most egregious of those things would have to be the lack of working and the restrictiveness it places upon the Player. After one too many instances of me trying to down attack, missing my target by just enough to not hit them but not by enough to not take contact damage, I decided that I don’t need to use it any more, because there’s some kind of downtime in between performing a down attack and performing a normal attack.
It feels as though it’s longer than the downtime between chained normal attacks, and so that’s unnerving and problematic. It feels bad to do the down attack. It feels worse when the down attack doesn’t work.
Normally, the down attack does some damage (miniscule amounts when compared to the normal attack) but it provides utility in that it propels the PC up, slightly, allowing for another down attack and another after that and, potentially, an infinite amount of down attacks. Not potentially, actually, conceptually, because by the third down attack the PC will somehow wind up colliding with the enemy and taking contact damage, breaking the streak and negating any positive effect doing the down attack could have had.
That’s the thing - the down attack SUPPOSEDLY propels the PC up a bit, and that bit is more than enough for the PC to do another down attack. However, what happens is that the PC perpetually loses altitude, even if they are landing down attacks in monstrously rapid succession. The issue here, potentially, comes from the invincibility frames of the enemies. Perhaps they’re still incapable of taking damage when the Player performs yet another down attack, thus making the PC slide all the way down into the hitbox and take contact damage.
Maybe that’s not it, but that’s the problem - it’s inconsistent, it doesn’t work, and something’s making it bad. Thus, it is just that - not good.
The last straw, however, is the normal attack. Whenever you or I press a button, we expect something to happen. If the thing that is supposed to happen is an attack’s performance, we expect it to happen as soon as the button is pressed. Rogue Legacy has decided to go against that and has made it part of the whole meme to force the Player to contend with a windup.
The worst part is is that the windup barely happens and is not conveyed visually, but it happens, there’s around a quarter of a second or maybe half of that quarter of a second, during which the PC is performing an attack, but that attack does not do anything. You might be swinging, you might be incapable of averting the events set in motion, but the attack will not do damage to anything, even if it is about to do contact damage to you right this instant. The windup period must first pass so that the attack can be performed.
That is DREADFUL. Considering the fact that this game requires you to be on edge, puts you in situations that force you to react so quickly it’s almost entirely based on you knowing what the enemy will do (via ‘tells’), this is stinky. Why? Because when you need to PRE-FIRE (which is something that gets done in games like CS:GO, involving the act of shooting at certain spots of a room as soon as you enter, before you even KNOW if there is someone in the room or on that spot) in a SINGLE-PLAYER GAME, not to compete for some record or a high score, but simply to MAKE IT THROUGH… That’s when we’ve got issues.
It’s made even worse by the fact that as SOON as the PC takes damage, no matter how close they are to actually doing the attack instead of winding up, the attack is CANCELED. Ladies, gentlemen and N bees, this roguelike makes your attacks go off late - built in latency, thank you for reminding me where the world of gaming is going (it’s a bad direction) - but it also punishes you additionally by making it so IF YOU DID NOT HAVE PERFECT TIMING, you don’t get to attack.
I’d like to say I’m resting my case, because, frankly, this has been excruciating, but there’s a little more I need to get off my chest.
This game becomes a slog. An unbearable, unpleasant grind. With all these things I pointed out as being unsatisfying or even bad lingering in your mind, with you seeing these inconsistencies and problems, you still need to play for at least a few more hours to get to the TRUE end game. That’s not fun, that’s not good, that’s definitely not what you want your game to become - especially if it’s a roguelike.
Making anything a slog is bad, except MMORPGs, which are so stinky in their design principles that it’s actually good for the game, and the player’s long-term experience, to have horrendous slogs or grinds. It might also not be bad in ARPGs, but it’s bad in everything else - and it’s also bad in ARPGs and MMORPGs, regardless of what addicts might claim.
All this game’s problems pile on and combine into a beast of unmatched dimensions, a beast so foul and unpleasant that I don’t want to deal with it. Sure, I did eventually deal with the ‘uber’ bosses, I did fight ‘the brothers’ in NG+2, but was it fun? No. Well, it was amusing, because these fights are almost completely disconnected from what the game actually is and present something totally outlandish.
The boss-fights in this are good. The mini-boss fights - not so much, but the boss fights are decently good. They do require stupendous amounts of trial and error, which annoyed me, but they were well done.
I’ll stop here, though. I could have mentioned equipment, and how it’s both super strange and wonky, as well as needlessly hard to come by, and how it’s also stupendously useful, but I feel as though its issues come from the rest of the issues I’ve outlined. I mentioned runes only in passing, but that’s because they’re barely interesting.
Yes, you do get to have contact damage, but it sucks and doesn’t fix the problem I spoke of. Yes, you do get extra gold, yes you do get healing and mana back, you get stuff, but nothing makes your shitty attacks better, so just eat it.
I really like Rogue Legacy on a conceptual level. I want to like it on a practical level, too, but I don’t. 2/3
Presentation
Cellar Door Games have done an impressively good job with making this game look the way that it does. It looks good. It looks as though it is its own thing. I’ll easily recognize the silly sword of the PC, I’ll know I’m looking at Rogue Legacy if I see any screenshot from the game.
The music is also kinda okay, even if I found it a bit… Lackluster, I suppose. Or maybe not my cup of tea.
The way the tutorial is done is not bad at all, and it is presented in a manner that is relevant to the story, as well. In fact, the presentation of this game might be its strongest suit, which is most intriguing.
That’s owed up to the concept of quirks I mentioned earlier, in the Gameplay section. Each character the Player gets to play is very likely to have at least one quirk. These quirks can slightly alter gameplay, but what they mostly do, and what I like about them, is that they alter the way the game looks. One character might see everything in black and white, another might see things in sepia, one might be short-sighted, making everything beyond a certain radius blurry, whilst another might be far-sighted, making everything within a certain radius blurry.
A character might have a condition where they curse and swear whenever they’re hit, or a character might have glaucoma and have everything outside of a certain radius be darkened, nigh imperceptible. A character might have dementia and might see enemies that aren’t actually there, who can’t be hit nor can they hit the character.
Those are stupendously interesting, and the most intriguing one of them would be ‘the One’, which turns everything into NEON! It’s so neat…
But that isn’t where it ends. This game is filled with references which I found quite endearing, quite pleasant. One would be that to ‘The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim’, another would be to ‘Naruto’, a third would be to ‘World Of Warcraft’ (at least I think it was such).
Admittedly I think I may have a weakness for pixel-art. Additionally, I might have a weakness for fantasy. Those, then, coupled, make for a very compelling, in my eyes, visual or even simply conceptual experience. I’ve nothing to complain about in relation to the Presentation of the game. 3/3
Story
This is it. The weakest part of the game. It’s weakest because it is made up of around 25 half pages worth of text. There is an interesting little twist at the end, but everything is so bare-bones that it barely matters.
I liked the way the 25 half pages were written. I liked the way it presented the character writing them going through the motions they were going through. I liked the reasoning behind their actions, I liked the logic to it.
Unfortunately, that’s all there’s to it. There was no interaction. When the Player recruits, say, the Enchantress, she presents a story detailing why it is that her current situation is as it is, she asks for the PC’s help… And then that’s that. Even if the Player brings her everything she has once lost, she does not say anything ever again, she does not react.
Every single ‘helpful’ character is like that. They’re all extremely limited and barely characters. The only exception might be Charon, who is so wreathed in mystery that there’s barely any character to be had, but then the clown and the miserly elf are also as mysterious and unknown as Charon, yet they’re far worse in the sense that the mystery does not make sense.
In fact, very little in this game makes sense, story-wise. It isn’t a game meant to be experienced for its story, and the story - the lore - is not even really meant to be considered. 1/3
Legendary Point
Does this game get the legendary point, so craved and wanted by all and none at the same time? Does the Rogue’s Legacy bring, with it, a special Legacy?
No, as I’ve explained at length. The story was not engaging, failing to grab me, the Gameplay had glaring issues, leaving me with a saddened, unfortunate realization that there’s a lot of ‘could been’, rather than ‘has been’.
Conceptually, this game is amazing. Actually? Not so much. 0/1
Conclusion
6/10. It’s a game that could be called slightly above average, but only slightly so. From the perspective of a game, from the perspective of the ‘playing’ of the game, it’s a solid game, but from the perspective of a game as a medium, as a synthesis of many arts, it’s not that good. On top of that, the solidity of its game-ness comes from its relative newness in the field… I suppose. Compared to newer entries in the Roguelike/Roguelite genre, it’s lagging far behind. Play it if you’re a fan of that kind of game.
I ponder whether I ought to hang it on the wall or tuck it under my belt. In the end, I place it in the bag of mediocrity. It’s near the top of the pile in there, so it wont be forgotten, but it’s still in the bag of mediocrity. It will gather some dust and simply remain there for all time.