Back at AGDQ 2021 there was a sponsored game being advertised all the time in the sidebar called “Loop Hero”. There was basically zero information about it, and it left my brain immediately.

Then it shipped, and my impression was like “uhhh, it sure looks like an auto-battler roguelike”, like “What if Progress Quest had graphics?” So I mentally shelved it.

Few months later it started cropping up on my Youtube recommendations, and . . it definitely seemed like more, but not like . . a lot more. Then it showed up on the feed of stuff from some of the crunchiest nerdiest content creators I know of, typically focusing on seriously cerebral games requiring a ton of thinking. Then it had my attention. If this seemingly shallow game can keep these kinds of players engaged it has some serious secret depth in there somewhere. So lets dig in.

It’s a completely bizarre game. At its core it’s an auto-battler roguelike, which is absurd. But it is interactive, you just interact with everything except the main character’s actions. Kills get you Gear, Cards and XP. Gear controls the specific stats of your hero, damage output, evasion, life leech, defense, etc.

But yeah it’s also a card game? Kills can drop cards, and cards map to . . uh . . literally the map. You build the map. All the game generates out the gate is a loop, and each tile of the loop can generate a basic mob. Nearly everything else is up to you, you chose where stuff goes, you choose what you even place, you choose what cards are even in your deck to start with. And it’s a super flexible system, adjacent cards can combine effects, some cards have AOE effects, some cards have explicit combos that result in new tiles appearing. Sometimes eliminating a tile can generate a new tile. The only randomness there is that some tiles have threshold triggers, like 10x mountains generate a goblin camp on a free tile alongside the loop. New Tiles might spawn enemies, might change the terrain, might provide healing, or might provide some kind of buff/debuff.

Finally, kills get you xp, and xp lets you choose a perk from a random pool of 3 when you level, which can subtlely modify how your character acts.

These three aspects lead to an immense amount of build variation, but what you’re building is the world. Then you let it roll. As you get new input you pause the game and see how you adjust. You see if a new pair of boots improves your evasion enough to be worth equipping. It’s pure min-maxing without having to worry about actual combat skill. But it’s not just a cakewalk, where you get to build whatever you want, because you’re still limited by the random chance of what you actually get. And you can’t just throw everything on the board, because you have to balance the level of challenge against the level of what your hero can handle. You have to dial it in a level of challenge that nets you sufficient loot and xp, but isn’t going to outright murder you immediately, and this is something you’re constantly having to adjust and weigh options on as you go. (Like, you might decide to drop something that’s going to increase difficulty, but drop it “behind” your current position, so you won’t have to deal with it until next loop when hopefully you’ll suck a little less.) You’re also limited by the loop itself, some constructs require certain loop layouts, or lend themselves to a certain build, giving you the flexibility to adjust as your run goes.

And then there’s between runs, you build a small town, assign crafted gear, etc. Mechanically this primarily provides you pretty typical roguelite-style constant upgrades, but the granularity you can tweak things to is just immense. You get mats as you run your loop, and these mats let you upgrade certain buildings, but because everything’s deterministic you can focus your build to improve a specific building. If you need four specific mats for an upgrade you need you can build out a hero / deck that delivers those kinds of resulting materials, and does it efficiently.

And yet despite all this it still feels directed, not undirected like RimWorld or Dwarf Fortress or whatever, and it doesn’t feel like a sandbox toy like Factorio and its ilk. It definitely still feels like a game because runs have clear win/lose conditions. Either you die (and lose most of your mats), you leave (by scurrying off at the end of a loop, keeping all your mats), or you use enough cards to spawn the boss and win.

It’s a spectacular game. It’s got an incredible amount of depth onto a 20x30-ish grid, but because everything interacts you get emergent gameplay, and it’s bizarre because it’s emergent gameplay that you’re directing and orchestrating.

I’ve spent 38h in it over the past several weeks, and just beat the final act of the game. My clear was with one of the three classes, I will likely go back for more. There’s another couple secret bosses, and a couple more achievements based on grinding and a couple based on doing very specific types of runs. I could also see DLC for new characters pretty easily dropped in, which would be great.

Highly highly recommended. Also hard to beat for the price / frequent sales.