Loop Hero it’s a lot of things: an RPG, a roguelite, an auto-battler, a card game, a city builder, an evocative visual novel. It is also excellent and I can’t stop playing.
Developed by Four Quarters (creator of the brilliant behavioral experiment of 2015 Please don’t touch anything) and today on Steam, the aptly titled Loop Hero watch you shepherd a warrior along a circular path as they fight various creatures, collect upgrades and gain crafting resources. Plagued by memory loss, you are trying to rebuild a world thrown into chaos by an evil lich. Each expedition in the random cycle helps you to unlock more things and accumulate more materials to rebuild a village, whose survivors, in turn, provide more bonuses the next time you venture into the void. It looks simple and repetitive, and on a very basic level it is, but it is extremely satisfying and full of interesting trade-offs to navigate. There is also a twist: you decide how each new loop will take shape.
The enemies you fight with drop cards. They are placed on the map to add new locations as if you were playing with a traditional city builder, except that instead of trying to create a thriving community, the goal is to create a dungeon that will maximize the upgrades and features you can earn without kill you immediately. You can play cards like mountains and meadows to increase your health and collect crafting materials, while an aristocratic mansion will summon vampires to fight you. The more resistant the monsters are, the better the rewards will be, until, eventually, you build your loop enough to summon the boss. You can fight to progress through the story and unlock the next cycle or retreat to your village with the things you have already won.
Either way, everything you have gained in the current cycle, outside of manufacturing materials, will disappear. Being forced to start each cycle over again may seem like a drag, but in my experience it is liberating, allowing me to try new strategies and correct past mistakes. Progress is a fickle thing. Sometimes this happens by leaps and bounds. Sometimes, it is completely eliminated. At the Loop Hero this means slowly moving back towards death only to recover furiously after winning a new powerful item or obtaining a more timely level that unlocks a new ability that synergizes perfectly with your existing charge.
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It’s all in one piece with Loop HeroThe biggest story about humanity trying to get out of oblivion with its claws. Nobody in the game is sure what is happening, how many times it has happened before or how many times it will happen again. Time can seem like a flat circle in many games, in which you spend a lot of your time completing variations on the same few tasks over and over. At the Loop Hero it seems especially evocative.
An ominous chiptune soundtrack imbues your minimalist, pixelated world with a dark but whimsical energy. The music increases and begins to sway when you reach the end of each performance, but then resumes during narrative interludes as your amnesiac protagonist tries to find out what is going on while the all-consuming darkness threatens to erase meaning and existence. “Eternity is going to turn you to dust, and I’m just a little cog in the process,” the lich tells you at one point. I felt that way about a lot of loot-based games, but I didn’t Loop Hero.
While Loop Hero it is an apocalyptic game, it is as much about rebuilding in the face of depression and despair as it is about surviving. Rather than simply trying to get the numbers up, or grind the loot necessary to grind for an even better loot, I look forward to enlisting in this war against the abyss to help your characters out of their cosmic malaise. Ultimately, there may not be any deep philosophical treatise on nihilism hidden in the circuit, but as we bend the curve on the pandemic’s one-year anniversary, I have already discovered Loop HeroThe representation of lowkey people struggling to overcome their surprisingly moving boredom and despair.
After playing for several hours, I beat only the third boss. I look forward to seeing this through to the end, however, both to find out what new combinations of cards and skills I can use to survive the loop, and to see if the completion of Loop HeroThe story of ‘lives up to the intriguing mysteries it exposes at the beginning.