Respawn. Spend. Die.
Repeat.
Rogue Legacy is
downright facile on its face. It's a
basic side-scrolling Rogue-a-like with strong platforming elements. Nothing new there. It has a cute little tech tree that lets you
select upgrades that make runs progressively easier, literalizing the
"repeat until easy" element that rogues usually keep hidden from the
view of players by giving you buffers against future mistakes. Well trod territory as well. It has quirky pixel art that makes renderings
of its oft horrifying foes cute and approachable. Downright trendy, that. It has a set of randomized traits that
sometimes make your characters do unexpected things, like fuck other characters
of the same sex, or walk on the world upside-down, or imagine monsters where no
monsters exist. Cute, and well executed,
but also nothing new to Rogue-a-like audiences.
I don't mean to be derisive; all of these elements are part
of what makes Rogue Legacy great, but
on their own they don't necessarily make for a great game. There's something more to Rogue Legacy, something that makes it
more than the sum of its parts, something that keeps me coming back.
If I had to choose one quality that makes it exceptional,
one thing that sets it aside from all of the other Rogue-a-likes out there in
the overcrowded market, it's the way the intense, punishing difficulty can be
adjusted on a strange, sliding scale.
See, Rogue Legacy is straight
up Ghosts and Goblins hard on its
own. The sliders gradually move this
difficulty farther and farther away from "insane" towards manageable,
making deeper and deeper incursions into its constantly reforming dungeon possible. There are ways to tweak this difficulty in
various other quasi-lateral directions as well.
Equipment can be arranged in ways that simply boosts stats, or it can be
arranged in ways that nebulously increases certain statistics at the cost of
others. If you want to equip a sword
that helps you earn more gold you'll have to sacrifice your ability to do
damage. If you want to increase the
amount of health you get back after each kill, you'll have to reduce the
maximum amount of health you can have at any given time. A similar economy exists within the Rune
system, wherein you manage objects that give you access to abilities like
flight, or simple things bonus gold or lifesteal. Some runes directly tweak the difficulty,
just making the game harder or easier, though this choice still requires a
choice: the choice to sacrifice the ability to one of those other interesting
things I mentioned earlier.
This leads to a system of interchangeable sliders that make
the game's constantly shifting difficulty even shiftier. That means that players who feel like Rogue Legacy is too unforgiving can make
it a little more forgiving, or that players who have rolled up a particularly
tough character - let's say a lich with no foot pulse and obsessive compulsive
disorder who can summon hordes of crows to seek out his enemies and peck them
to death - they can boost the difficulty of the game to try and get a little
more gold out of their playthrough.
All this is built on a system that assumes you're going to
die, frequently. It's a system that lets
you tweak your frustration level so that it's just where you want it to
be. I can't think of any other
Rogue-a-like that lets you mess around with difficulty and adjust your somewhat-random
character's experience in a somewhat-random dungeon to such a great
extent. Of course, it does so while
keeping you at arm's length, preventing you from exercising total control over
your Rogue-ing experience. You might
only have access to characters with IBS, or the character who can make a little
more money might have glaucoma. This is
the meat of Rogue Legacy's gameplay, and
it arrives not with the easy vanguard of snickering, simpering humor, but in a fashion
that adds layer upon layer to an economy of factors split into two broad
categories: those you can control and those you simply have to deal with.
Some Rogue-a-likes make themselves enticing by being
especially funny or tongue in cheek - Dungeons
of Dredmor, most prominently. Some
Rogue-a-likes make themselves enticing by being especially accessible or fast
paced - Nuclear Throne and Risk of Rain instantly come to mind. The first person multiplayer Rogue-like has
also become a genre of late, as well as a brutal Darwinian social experiment
pitting brother against brother until only one man remains standing in arenas
like 7 Days to Die, Rust, and Day Z. Some Rogue-a-likes
are especially interested in building narratives, some are especially
forgiving. Rogue Legacy doesn't acquit itself especially well in any of these
regards. In fact, I'm hard pressed to
point out any one exceptionally executed factor in its design that I'd usually
seek out in a Rogue-a-like game, and yet I remain captivated by it.
Rogue Legacy makes
its way in the world by meshing old school, punishing gameplay with a
difficulty curve that adjusts masterfully to its players, not a particularly
auspicious quality to advertise. There's
more to it than that, which is part of what makes it so hard to nail down. Rogue Legacy is more than the sum of its
parts. It's something ephemeral,
something difficult to nail down, something elementally constructed,
unforgiving and uncompromising and simultaneously accommodating. Readily accessible and possessed of
tremendous depth. Rogue Legacy is a collection of functional, fun contradictions that
align in just the right way.
It's not a perfect game, but that adds something to it. Uncovering odd issues and mistakes can add a
great deal of depth to the already slippery gameplay of a Rogue-a-like. It keeps things unexpected, and unexpected
occurrences are the meat of what makes a Rogue-a-like great. There's no real narrative, despite the
off-beat/menacing journal entries that populate its world, which would normally
be a huge knock against it for me, but there's something coursing and raw about
the lack of narrative, about its conscious movement towards death, the ultimate
narrative interruption, that makes its experience that much more engaging. Any more story would distract from the
important bits. More complicated
gameplay would remove some of the instantaneity of the play. Between the sliding difficulty and the
overarching metagame, grounding the action in a sense of real progress while
simultaneously allowing players to fail readily, the mix seems to be just
right. Rogue Legacy has managed to
combine the elements of Rogue-a-likes in just the right combination so that the
sweet pattern of their play is tighter than its ever been before, and I find myself
coming back to it again and again. At
its core, it's so simple.
Respawn. Spend. Die.
Repeat.
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