Rogue legacy music3/20/2023 ![]() Taking your time, building up your family’s wealth and translating it into “easier dungeon-delving living” is the allure of the game and kind of its point. I have to admit that this is one of the few games that I have ever reviewed without fully completing before sitting down to write it up, but honestly, there is just so much game here. Tramping through the dungeon over and over, finding and battling bosses in each of the four main sections of the game, and building up your family’s coffers over the long haul are all made fun and whimsical through the game’s often wicked sense of humor and through the simple, basic, but often quite challenging retro game play. Again, as someone that has some very real tendencies toward hypochondria, I had to laugh. If you are playing as a character with the hypochondriac trait, the game instead reports numbers like “-6781HP” (even though you actually took -21 damage). As a hypochondriac myself, I kind of loved that trait, as each time a character is struck in the game a “-21HP” (for example) springs up on screen in green to let you know how hurt you are. Some of these traits are merely gags, though. I don’t like being far sighted as the area around your character will be fuzzy and out of focus, making precise attacks and jumps a bit harder to perform. Gigantism is not too bad a quality to have as it gives you a much longer reach when slashing with a sword. Some of these traits effect gameplay in positive ways. They are apparently genes that just happen to exist in the family’s gene pool and each time that you die and have to pick a new hero, they may be arbitrarily assigned to one of your three new picks. These qualities, unlike the money accrued while dungeon delving, are not actually genes that you can pass on in a direct and deliberate way. Indeed one of the pleasures of the game is the “inherited” abilities that new heroes might possess, including near sightedness, far sightedness, hypochondria, a propensity towards flatulence, or even something like Tourette’s syndrome). ![]() Rogue Legacy‘s medieval setting, though, speaks to its fairly antique approach to the economics of inheritance rather nicely, though, and, again, after all, it is frequently more farcical than not. I find the game’s antiquated model of old money’s benefits to a society’s future prosperity somewhat ironic in an era in which the previous generation just won’t die (sorry, Baby Boomers, but you won’t) or retire, leaving their wealth and money to successive generations to build on, to make life just a little bit easier for their children and grandchildren. This castle comes to represent not you, but inherited wealth and how the work of previous generations makes your life storming the castle over and over again just that much easier for successive generations. ![]() Because all of the gold that one ancestor collects on a failed run through the dungeon is inherited by the next hero in your line, you more frequently set short term goals, like merely looting the castle well enough this time to build up an ancestral home that will best serve as the foundation of the family’s power base.Īfter loading up a new hero, you visit a screen featuring your family’s home in which you can make purchases that improve stats like hit points, attack and armor bonuses, and the like as well as new character classes and upgrades to previously purchased or owned character classes. Unlike mini-roguelikes like The Binding of Isaac or FTL because of the length of the game and the nature of building up your character on the backs of your ancestors successes and failures, the game is not about merely practicing enough to get good at surviving through to the end. The addition of the rogue-like element to the game adds to the difficulty and also makes the idea of an extended quest fought hard over dozens and dozens of hours of perseverance and practice (as early Zelda and Mario games required) the central focus of the game. The result is a game that aesthetically and mechanically owes much of its inspiration to the SNES era of games with its 16-bit style graphics and the fact that its platforming is what many gamers refer to as “Nintendo hard” (it will also remind arcade era fans of Ghosts ‘n Goblins an awful lot). A new character is birthed to enter the halls of Castle Hamson to seek out a medicine to save the king (who absurdly seems to be dying for hundreds of years, since his ancestry just keeps at it generation after generation - but the game’s glib and often teasing tone hardly suggests that you should take any of the plot all that seriously anyway). ![]() Each character death means that the quest to find a cure for a dying king is passed on to the next generation. The rogue-like elements of the game are grounded on the idea of familial succession. It is a platformer that also doubles as a rogue-like. Rogue Legacy is a game about inheritance.
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