The balancing act is between adding useful tiles and not overwhelming the hero with new enemies.However, along with the benefits that those tiles bring (largely minor things like boosts to attack speed for forests or a town that restores some HP when your hero passes through) come corresponding tradeoffs. As your hero fights they earn cards representing map tiles among their other loot, and the conceit is that placing these tiles makes the hero “remember” that features like forest groves, mountains, villages, rivers, and more were actually part of the world all along, restoring them to reality. So for the first few uneventful loops, well, it's a good time to fill your water glass or grab some snacks in the kitchen.īut Loop Hero soon gets you occupied and challenged – and this is where the ability to pause between battles becomes essential. This even goes for boss battles: it’s very strictly your stats vs theirs. Once you're in a fight your fate is controlled by your and your enemies' Attack Speed, Defense, and Damage stats, with a dash of whether or not the percentage chance gods give you more Crits, Counters, and Evades than the other side. In those first few minutes you won't do much, quite literally, as battles are hands-off. The correspondingly retro music's good, too, even if a few tracks play a bit too often for the couple dozen hours Loop Hero will likely take you to play through. The art in fights is more detailed, showing 8-bit warriors slugging it out with basic attack animations, though like a 1990 RPG the sprites don't vary with changes in weapon or as enemies level up. It’s inhabited only by your hero – little more than a 4-bit blob of white pixels – and a handful of bouncing green bubbles representing basic slime blob enemies. This is the most excellently surreal apocalyptic fantasy setting since Dark Souls.The map is represented with charmingly simple pixel graphics for the loop itself, which begins as a featureless, angular path through the lonely darkness. The conversations and unlockable tidbits of lore are wonderfully meandering oddities.

You have strange, dreamlike conversations with the people and creatures you meet, from bandits unsure why they're stealing to goblins who have somehow remembered themselves right into existence. It's a delightfully unsettling, disorienting place where even the elaborate pixel art portraits of the bad guys aren't sure what's going on.Įverything is forgotten except, of course, your lone hero, who walks a circular path through the void, fighting monsters and - crucially - remembering things before coming back to a campfire to rest. Even abstract concepts like knowledge and permanence are vanishing into the void. Loop Hero’s world is ending nobody can remember things anymore, so those things are disappearing. I only escaped because once its stat-building puzzles are solved there’s not much more to it.īefore we even get to its strangely hypnotic and unorthodox gameplay, it has to be said that this is the most excellently surreal apocalyptic fantasy setting since Dark Souls. This exploratory experiment drew me in so deeply with its buffet of synergies and clever strategies that I lost track of time while playing more often than not. There's nothing quite like this strange combination of idle game autobattler with roguelite deckbuilding and puzzley tile placement. But what's left if you take away character control and just about everything but crunching stat numbers and filling in the map? You get Loop Hero, and it turns out to be a game full of compellingly unique ideas and a weird fantasy world that demands attention. The tactical decisions, crunching numbers, the strategizing, conserving strength for future encounters. Traditionally, some of the best stuff in an RPG is the combat.

Loop hero review ign