One can’t stop moving in Lara Croft: Relic Run

First, once more, it’s hard to find good screenshots for Lara Croft: Relic Run that adhere to my blog’s specifics, which is why the above image looks all stretched and odd. It’s better than no image, I guess. I already used my one allotted Angelina Jolie shot for the game completed haiku. Or maybe I should’ve just used the game’s title image screen, which is easily found as a desktop wallpaper in all types of dimensions, but I’d rather you at least see what this adventure into the dinosaur- and lizard monster-laden jungle looks like. It looks like the above, just not all stretched and odd. In fact, the visuals in this mobile game are top-notch, though it moves a little too fast to really notice.

It can be hard to determine when one is done with an endless runner, as the genre name itself implies a certain indefiniteness. That said, I think I’m done with Lara Croft: Relic Run, having played for many hours and gotten most of the Achievements and seen nearly everything I want to see as Lara herself zips forward, slides to not lose her head on a low ceiling or fallen branch, shoots a red barrel to explode and kill two monsters, and tumble to her grisly death as she misses a jump, but snags a shiny map icon along the way down. Whew. Long sentence.

Hey, remember Temple Run 2? Yeah, me too. Well, Lara Croft: Relic Run is mostly Temple Run 2, but with its own branding and a few slight differences, though I guess all endless runners are simply about moving forward, collecting stuff, and not running into walls. In this one, you control Lara herself, except no scary monster beast is chasing behind you; instead, you are running forward, in search of relics, which will hopefully provide clues to a missing friend. Or unlock the mystery behind a shadowy conspiracy. Honestly, the smidgen of story text you get from each collected clue barely gives you any idea of what is going on, but that’s okay–story takes a backseat in this, especially when you start hopping off a T-Rex’s back through fallen rubble like some kind of cool action hero.

You jog forward into the jungle, swiping left and right to change lanes, up to jump, down to slide. As you hustle, Lara will collect coins, occasionally shoot things, like lizard-monsters tossing spears at her face, fight a T-Rex in various ways, gather glowing clues to unlock relics, and rinse and repeat until she stumbles and tumbles to her death. Which definitely will happen eventually as the obstacles ramp up the farther in you get. Then, before your next run, you can use those gold coins (or harder-to-get diamonds) to purchase power-ups or upgrade your outfit/weaponry, as well as buy curses to send to other players on your friends list, which affect how the game looks and plays for a limited period of time.

One element I’m really not fond of in Lara Croft: Relic Run, which I also wasn’t fond of in that Tomb Raider reboot, is that when Lara Croft dies, she dies in the most outrageous manner possible. Her bones seemingly separate beneath her skin, and arms and legs flip and flop like fish out of water. The camera occasionally lingers on a shot of her crumpled form for a few seconds too long. It’s a little too much for a cartoony game about running and jumping.

I’m walking away from Lara Croft: Relic Run with three Achievements still locked. One requires Lara to run a certain distance without every sliding, which I swear I’ve done before, but it might be glitched. The other asks you to send six curses to friends, but only provides five to purchase; good job, Square Enix. The last one requires Lara to collect a total of 1,000,000 coins; seeing as I’ve only garnered 79,461 after all my play-time, this is too much of a grind for even l’il ol’ grindy me. Yup, the dude that got co-op Achievements by himself in Lara Croft: Guardian of Light doesn’t want to make the effort here, which probably says enough.

I wonder what the next free-to-play endless runner I’ll try will be. A sick part of my brain worries that it’ll be Despicable Me: Minion Rush.

What in the world is broken with What in the World?

Look, finding decent screenshots of mobile games from my Windows 8 phone is nearly impossible, so I’m just going to grab random screencaps from HBO’s Game of Thrones episodes and roll with it from there. I’m sure you are all bummed to come here and see a smiling Carice van Houten as the ever-untrustworthy Melisandre rather than a static shot of What in the World?, a relatively plain-looking trivia game. But that’s just logistics, here at Grinding Down.

Originally, I wasn’t going to write about What in the World?, which I completed back in June 2015. When I say “completed,” I mean I finished all the available puzzles and popped every Achievement, including the one where developer Game Troopers asks you to log into Facebook so you can then share your score and other bullcrap. I didn’t consider the game a big enough experience to give it its very own haiku. Well, I just completed it again, seeing as it got a free update recently with more puzzles to solve, as well as Achievements to pop. Unfortunately, the game seems more broken than before, or perhaps it is time I heed all those pestering text messages from Verizon and upgrade to a new cellular phone. Nahhh.

First off, I had to replay What in the World? from the very beginning because, upon completing it a few months ago, I naturally uninstalled it from my phone, believing that this word-guessing puzzle slog forward was finished. My bad, but whatever. Seeing as the levels in this game are not random, I planned to just use a guide to get through all the odd celebrity names and foreign countries foreign to my knowledge, blitzing my way through once more so that I could play the new level 6 puzzles. This took several days, which is fine, as there’s an Achievement for playing for five consecutive days, but I probably could’ve gotten through everything in a night if the application didn’t break my phone within three or four minutes of each session.

Every few puzzles, a message pops up, either asking you to write a review of the game or rate it or follow the developer on Twitter. Annoying, but it’s a free game and does have the option to pay and remove ads, though I don’t know if these messages count as advertisements. I clicked “no” each and every time, but each and every time I did, the game slowed down, which, when you are dealing with a static image, is not extremely noticeable, but it dragged its feet when moving from right answer to a new puzzle. After a few of these, the game simply chugged at an unacceptable rate, nearly freezing my phone and killing its battery. Also, once you complete a full level, instead of returning you to the level select menu, What in the World? closes down and returns you to your home screen, which is not helpful.

Either way, I won’t be uninstalling What in the World? for a second time, as it looks like there’s more updates to come. I’m sure you are wondering why I’d put up with more glitchy sluggishness, and the answer is twofold: relatively easy Achievements and I guess I’m pretty into pop culture trivia. There were only a few puzzles that I really didn’t have a clue on, and again, most of these relate to countries or cities. Also, maybe before the next update, the developers will patch the game to have it work better on older cell phone models. Unlikely, but a boy can hope. Don’t worry…I’ll complain here if they don’t.

2015 Game Review Haiku, #44 – The Stanley Parable

You play as Stanley
So alone at work, in life
Find all his endings

–

From 2012 all through 2013, I wrote little haikus here at Grinding Down about every game I beat or completed, totaling 104 in the end. I took a break from this format last year in an attempt to get more artsy, only to realize that I missed doing it dearly. So, we’re back. Or rather, I am. Hope you enjoy my continued take on videogame-inspired Japanese poetry in three phases of 5, 7, and 5, respectively.

Playing co-op the solo way in Lara Croft: Guardian of Light

I keep saying that I’m working at completing games saved on my limited Xbox 360 hard-drive space in hopes of then deleting these finished games and making room for those in my growing download queue too large to acquire until some room clears up…but really, I’m dragging my feet. Or rather, my hands. Sure, sure, I polished off The Raven‘s first episode and Assassin’s Creed II some time back, but it’s not enough. Not when Microsoft keeps giving out full retail games as digital downloads, with each ranging between 6 and 9 GB of required space. Feel free to insert a first-world problems snarky comment here; I’ve earned it.

So, over the weekend, I took a good hard look at the list of games on my Xbox 360 and decided that I had let Lara Croft: Guardian of Light sit idle for far too long. According to How Long to Beat, it should only take me about six hours to complete. I think I can do that, especially when you consider that my save sits somewhere around the fourth or fifth level; basically, I just took down the magically deadly T-rex, which was previously a stone statue. Perhaps that means I only have about four or five hours to go if I really get to work and don’t run into any snags. I don’t plan on trying to collect every weapon or relic or do all the challenge rooms that are unearthed, simply finish all the levels.

Perhaps I’ll have more to say about the main storyline or rolling around, dropping button-controlled bombs, and blasting enemies with a staggering assortment of weaponry, but for now, I want to speak about co-op play, as Lara Croft: Guardian of Light is designed mostly from the ground up to be played simultaneously by two players. Either with a friend beside you or across the great expanse we know as the Internet.

Ultimately, honestly, I just wanted to unlock the four Achievements tied to co-op play, because I guess I still care about these things, which are as follows:

A Friend in Need (20G) – Play Co-op mode

 

Leap of Faith (15G) – Catch Totec with the grapple while he is jumping over a death fall

Return to Sender (15G) – Reflect an enemy’s projectile back to him using Totec’s shield

Jump Jump (10G) – Jump from Totec’s shield while he is jumping

 

Here’s the rub: I did unlock them all…by myself. Yup, I sunk low and played a two-player game with myself, jumping back and forth between two controllers on my lap, one for Lara and one for Totec. First, I did try to find if anyone was online and playing, but after numerous attempts, no games were found. Which makes total sense, seeing we are five years out from its launch, especially given that there’s already a sequel to this, called Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris. Second, I don’t really have many IRL gamer friends, which is one of the reasons I still haven’t even purchased a second controller for my PS3.

To be honest, because I did this single-handedly (well, not literally), these Achievements feel all the harder earned. Though the first one, A Friend in Need, simply required me turning on a second controller and starting a co-op game. Easy peasy there. It gets gradually more difficult. Jump Jump saw me holding down the left bumper on the controller for Totec, while using the other controller to get Lara to jump on his shield; after that, while still holding down the left bumper, I had to hit Totec’s jump button and quickly follow it by hitting the jump button for Lara, which took a few tries. Leap of Faith required similar tactics.

However, to unlock Return to Sender, which requires Totec to use his shield to bounce an enemy’s projectile back at them, one must make it to the second level. That means completing the first co-op level, and for the most part, I could simply leave one character standing still in a corner while the other character took care of enemies and puzzles before moving both of them along the main path. There are two sections in that first level where both characters need to be constantly moving, working in tandem, and this proved challenging as I had to juggle moving both Lara and Totec and using their respective skills–Totem can create platforms with his spear while Lara can use her rope thingy to make bridges and climb walls–truthfully, I’m still amazed I got through it all.

With those silly Achievements now mine, all I really want to do left with Lara Croft: Guardian of Light is complete the main story, with little concern to score challenges and collecting all the weapons or relics. Once that’s done, it’ll be uninstalled, and I’ll be one step closer to maybe causing chaos in Just Cause 2.

Writing the story as I go with 50,000 Gamerscore

There was a time when I was immensely interested in unlocking Achievements and watching my Gamerscore grow in length and size. No, really. Just look around this very blog of mine, through the archives, and you’ll see my thoughts when I hit 10,000 Gamerscore on the dot, followed by 20,000 Gamerscore, and 30,000, and, interestingly, 41,000 back in September 2013. I even had a weekly feature for a bit there highlighting a sample of Achievements I unlocked over seven days. Yeah, remember that craziness? Now we’re lucky if I can put up a single post in a week’s time, but that’s a topic for a different day.

I was pretty devoted to the cause early on, but slowly, bit by bit, I stopped playing my Xbox 360 as much, and you can blame that on my acquiring of a PlayStation 3 in January 2013, a lot of good games on the Nintendo 3DS, and digging deep on indies and point-and-click adventure games on the PC (well, in my case, a laptop). There’s another reason, which involves a cold living room and expensive oil bills, but that’s drama in the past, and now I am able to stay cool/warm to any degree.

Well, here I am, once more, with 50,000 Gamerscore on the nose, attained on July 31, 2015 thanks to an Achievement in Lara Croft: Relic Run, which involved shooting 25 projectiles from enemies out of the air. It’s fine if you don’t believe me; that’s what pictures are for, anyways. Here, take a gander:

Well, that’s a big screenshot. Did you know I had to Google “how to take a screenshot on Windows phone” in order to get the image above? Yeah, I may be decent at unlocking Achievements–well, no, not in the grand scheme of things given how many there actually are out there–but relatively simple technology actions still require some learning on my part. I’ll get there, I promise.

Here’s the thing. I both care greatly about Achievements, as well as don’t care. Let me explain. There is no race to the top; I’m not in a hurry to grow my Gamerscore and watch those lists of locked Achievements get whittled down, all for the sake of boasting, showing off my bulging e-muscles. For all I know, I might not hit 60,000 ever. Still, I can’t resist pulling up a game’s list and scanning through the Achievements, seeing what looks “do-able” versus what I’ll have to give up on from the very start. They occasionally bring me back to a game or give me the motivation to try something else, especially if in a rut, like going after all the skull collectibles in Motocross Madness.

At this point, I’ve already moved past the clean, nicely rounded 50,000 score, popping a few more Achievements from Lara Croft: Relic Run. The magic is over. You can’t stop a leaky faucet from dripping. Some other cool-sounding phrase that relates to all this. There’s also a laundry list of Xbox 360 games, all full of future unlockable Achievements, sitting in my download queue, waiting until there’s more room on my internal hard-drive. Here, let me name a few–Just Cause 2, Thief, Gears of War 3, and Metro 2033. Lastly, Fallout 4 comes out in a few months–what a strange sentence to write after so many years of day-dreaming–and I need to make the leap to the current generation before the game drops; I suspect, thanks to the extra effort from Microsoft for backwards compatibility, that I’m leaning towards an Xbox One, which only means more Achievements and silly posts documenting all these non-milestones. You are welcome in advance.

The Raven’s old-fashioned mystery is not enough to captivate

The truth is this–it is way easier to write about a bad game than a good game. Also, much more fun. Gushing over fantastic gameplay mechanics or a clever story is all well and good, but nothing makes the eyes dilate or lips quiver like venomous prose, the kind that pins its prey to the wall and tortures it into unconsciousness. See, already enjoying this opening paragraph greatly.

Which brings us to The Raven: Legacy of a Master Thief. Well, at least the first episode (of three), developed by KING Art and published by Nordic Games Publishing, which stars Constable Anton Jakob Zellner, a soft-spoken but determined man of the Swiss police force, as he solves the mystery of The Raven, an art burglar who has stolen one of the legendary “Eyes of the Sphinx” from a British museum in London in 1964. It’s a point-and-click adventure game, though the version I played was on a console–specifically the Xbox 360–which means it is more accurately described as a control-a-character-and-move-around adventure game since there is no cursor for pointing.

The Raven: Legacy of a Master Thief‘s story is middling at best. I will give the game credit for presenting us with a non-typical protagonist; in an industry built upon the burly shoulders of rugged, frowny face men wielding shotguns, Zellner comes across as a for-hire mall Santa Claus during the off-season. He’s soft-spoken, observant, and always up for a conversation. Later on, when aboard a cruise ship, it appears that he is cosplaying as the leader of a local bowling team. There are moments that I’m sure the developers would like to think of as “twists,” but they can be seen coming from a good distance away, and this first episode ends on the reveal of a character that clearly didn’t try to hide their true identity along the way.

To move the story forward, you must solve puzzles, all of which are grounded in logic and reality. They are not hard, save for a few instances where the developers try to mix things up, like introducing a one-off lockpicking puzzle or a game of shuffleboard. Truthfully, the most difficult part of solving these puzzles is finding the required items, as controlling Zellner is about as graceful as maneuvering a drunk tree. If I was playing on a PC, one could simply navigate the cursor over the desired item and click on it to have Zeller investigate; here, instead, one must walk him, using everyone’s favorite tank control scheme, over to the item, which is not as simple as it sounds. Actually, once he is close enough, the item will highlight itself with a button prompt, but only if Zellner is looking in its general direction. Something else to remember is that examining an item more than once will provide further details and clues.

Now let me tell you about the most frustrating part of Episode One for The Raven: Legacy of a Master Thief. It’s around the middle, right after, spoiler, something causes the train everyone is on to crash. This plunges the game into chaos and darkness, with your first goal being to make a torch of some sort. That way you can see who needs help and what to do next. That’s all well and good, but the game, at this point, becomes so dark it is nearly impossible to tell where Zellner is walking and what items are around him. Eventually, I blasted the brightness on my television screen to full in order to see what was where, which just made everything seem extra ridiculous.

There are also a huge number of technical issues throughout, ranging from audio clipping, silly path navigation, and way too lengthy loading screens, which become a huge hassle during the third act. There, you can visit a number of screens and must do to backtracking, but going from one to another requires a long load–each and every time. The graphics certainly seem at home for an early Xbox 360 game except until one realizes this came out in 2013. Also, the dang thing froze on me once when I tried to pull up my inventory immediately after some dialogue tree. Lastly, there is an entire hint/score system that is never introduced or explained, but there none the less, like some strange afterthought.

Unfortunately, while this first episode of The Raven: Legacy of a Master Thief was a Games With Gold freebie, I won’t be spending any money on the additional two episodes. Not even the crazy quick cliffhanger ending got me by the wallet. If anything, I may watch them on YouTube to see how things unfolded story-wise, but I don’t expect the gameplay or puzzles to change wildly, which is where the game truly lost me. Oh well. At least deleting this off my Xbox 360’s hard-drive won’t be as difficult as getting Zellner to talk to the suspicious man with the newspaper and not head outside the door next to him.

2015 Game Review Haiku, #38 – The Raven: Legacy of a Master Thief (Episode 1)

Catch the art burglar
As Zellner makes for Egypt
Beyond tedious

–

From 2012 all through 2013, I wrote little haikus here at Grinding Down about every game I beat or completed, totaling 104 in the end. I took a break from this format last year in an attempt to get more artsy, only to realize that I missed doing it dearly. So, we’re back. Or rather, I am. Hope you enjoy my continued take on videogame-inspired Japanese poetry in three phases of 5, 7, and 5, respectively.

Abobo’s Big Adventure is a risible romp through the NES era

I’m now at the point that I no longer remember where I download these strange little games. Could be a random website, some sort of bundle, or even just a blog post pointing me to something interesting. I just stumble across them in my “videogames” folder on my desktop days, weeks, and months later, with new names popping up left and right, often giving me pause. Maybe I accidentally fed one after midnight, and now they are spreading like wildfire, threatening to take over my time with so-called bigger games, despite many of these wee indie oddballs working a thousand times better than anything produced by an actual studio these days. Mm-hmm. Still annoyed about that.

Thankfully, Abobo’s Big Adventure helped put a smile on my face and keep me distracted while Dragon Age: Inquisition continued to fold in upon itself. And that’s surprising, because, while I appreciate the NES for what it was and still is today, I have little nostalgia for it. I never had one as a wee boy, though some neighbors did; videogaming didn’t truly happen for me until that Christmas morning when I unwrapped a Super Nintendo, which came pre-packed with a copy of Super Mario World. That said, Abobo’s Big Adventure is a loving tribute to the NES era, and I get a lot of the references and sprites and winking nods, but there’s also some more obscure elements zipping right on by. It’s an odd mix of old and new, but is thankfully a ton of fun to play, even rekindling my desire to trek through the original Legend of Zelda.

For those that don’t know–and I didn’t know upon starting up this free Flash game–Abobo comes from Double Dragon, appearing multiple times, often as a boss character. I played some Double Dragon in my early days, but this character never stood out to me; I guess the developers behind Abobo’s Big Adventure felt otherwise, thrusting him upon a quest to rescue his son, the hilariously named Aboboy. To do this, Abobo must travel through eight different levels, all themed to a classic NES title. I got as far as the one based around Mega Man, but more on that soon.

The controls are very simple, though they obviously change a bit from level to level. Basically, you move with the arrow keys and execute techniques with “A” and “S,” giving you the sensation of using an NES controller in terms of complexity. You can fill up a meter and tap both A and S together for a special move of sorts. Abobo’s actions change with each level, going from fighting goons in scummy alleyways to exploring a top-down dungeon to floating right to left thanks to some helium-pumped balloons. Abobo’s Big Adventure does a good job of mimicking how these old games looked and played, while also infusing them with modern mechanics and less-than-inspired teenage-level humor. Yup, looking at you, penis-shaped Zelda dungeon map. It’s probably silly to call this out in 2014, but the built-in Achievements system is quite flashy and reminded me of the days when Achievements were designed to be fun, rewarding, and experimental. After reading some descriptions, I went back and got a few out-of-the-way ones.

Much like their original counterparts, some parts of Abobo’s Big Adventure are tough, real challenges of skill. This mostly relates to the boss battles, such as the Old Man in the Zelda-themed one, but I found the entire Balloon Fight flight to be a tough grind, as well as the underwater level. The difficulty became too much once I hit the Mega Man level, which features everyone’s favorite off-screen laser beams to narrowly avoid. If you’ll recall, I’ve never been even mediocre at Mega Man games, and so, after multiple attempts of trying to take down the second form of the boss here, I’ve walked away. The keyboard’s not cutting it. And that’s okay. I got through most of Abobo’s Big Adventure, had a pretty good time, and saw plenty; I can’t imagine what comes later is too surprising, though I might find a Let’s Play to see what the last few levels act like.

While games like Shovel Knight and Axiom Verge are obviously deeply inspired by the classics from gaming’s so-called Golden Age, Abobo’s Big Adventure is them. Just slightly warped and more accessible. If you’re itching for something kind of like an NES game, but also not, I say give this a go. Watch out for that damaging TMNT seaweed in the underwater level though.

Ridding a lambent tree of every evil, parasitic creature

Originally, despite having owned a copy of Botanicula for a good while now, I was planning to experience it firsthand raw, in the flesh, during my Extra Life stream in this past October. However, when I went to load it up, something turned wonky with my streaming program and was not able to capture footage despite being able to capture other windowed games prior. Instead of sitting there and pounding my head against a metaphoric wall, I moved on to another title to keep the action hot, but always planned to get back to Amanita Design’s bug-based point-and-click adventure game.

So, what’s the narrative all about? Botanicula centers around a rag-tag group of tree-dwelling creatures searching for the last seed of their home, a giant tree unfortunately infested by evil parasites. Sure, this excursion sounds ultra serious and something the U.S. EPA could get behind, but there’s a great deal of humor to eat up thanks to the game’s zany five heroes and creative critter designs. For the first half of the adventure, the game’s environments and clickable bugs are bright and amusing (for example, the tambourine bug above), though things get pretty dark by the end, both figuratively and literally. Either way, it’s a straightforward story with a lot of personality, but few surprises–and that’s okay. It’s good versus evil, life versus nature, cute bugs versus villainous spiders.

Gameplay-wise, Botanicula is a puzzle game, one that often asks the player to think outside the box. That said, many puzzles simply devolve down to clicking/tapping on the most obvious of things on the screen (the bugs themselves, large plants, strange items) and watching what happens; generally, something happens. There is no in-game hint system or even text-on-screen guide to point players in the right direction, but the puzzles never got to the place where progress felt unmovable. Every screen has a number of tiny secrets to discover, too. My favorite section was about midway through the journey, when the gang arrives in a large village of problematic onion houses, asked to gather a number of birds to help run a machine. The puzzles here were sometimes isolated to a single house, while others gave you items to use elsewhere. Still, this is more a point-and-click exploration romp than an adventure game.

Let’s pause and talk about Botanicula‘s soundtrack. Which is astounding. The constantly unpredictable and tinkling audio is supplied by the Czech band DVA and is peppered throughout the game in numerous ways. Some scenes are interactive, with you making the music by bouncing on mushrooms or clicking bugs in a certain order, while other tunes are rewards for solving a puzzle or making some insect happy. It’s all very pleasing, except when it is scary, and then it is terrifying.

Last year, I finally got around to playing–and completing–Machinarium, which is truthfully no easy task. Some of those puzzles were absolutely maddening, and yet I couldn’t not solve them. Amanita Design’s games brim with color and character, not to mention colorful characters, and the switch from robots to bugs in Botanicula does little to change that hard-earned fact. I think I ended up looking up a single puzzle solution this time around, and it turned out I was on the right track to solving it myself, but just didn’t take it all the way there. Your inventory never becomes bloated, and it is usually pretty clear where you need to go or what you need to collect to move forward.

In total, Botanicula took about three to four hours to get through, and I ate it up in a single sitting over the Thanksgiving break while enjoying some quiet time down at my father’s place in South Jersey. As you go along and encounter all the various friendly/non-friendly insects, you collect animated cards of them; if I had been playing a Steam version, I think those are all related to Achievements. Anyways, I didn’t collect them all by the time the credits rolled, but I got enough to open up two bonus menu items after completing the game. I might YouTube what you get for collecting all the cards. Either way, I’m so glad I finally got around to ridding this tree of evil bugs; it was an odd little trip, but without a doubt memorable.

Rogue Legacy’s castle of chance keeps on giving

I don’t completely understand how this happened, but this is the first post I’ve dedicated to writing about Rogue Legacy, despite playing it off and on for the last few months. I mean, generally, save for some exceptions, I write about every game I’m playing–at least once. And yet, Rogue Legacy never really got in the spotlight despite accidentally eating up a few hours of my Extra Life stream; hey, it’s rather addicting. It’s also completely different than Rogue Galaxy, an awesome Level-5 JRPG for the PlayStation 2, but with both names being oh-so-similar I think I mixed them up a bunch when speaking. My bad. This post will now only be about the indie platform game with rogue-like elements, not the one starring a young, rebellious Jaster Rogue.

Rogue Legacy from Cellar Door Games is an indie platform game heavy on giving you one chance to win. Its biggest hook is that you are constantly playing as the child of the character you last played as, often gaining some of the previous parent’s traits while showcasing new ones. These greatly affect how you explore the randomly generated castles, as some traits, like blurry vision, only let you see so far ahead, while others, like two left hands, change the direction you normally cast spells in. There are also many other traits that have little to no impact on gameplay, just there for decoration. My personal favorites are dwarfism and ADHD, meaning you are both small and fast. Couple that with a good spellcaster, and enemies drop like flies as you zip on through.

While the early deep-dives into Rogue Legacy feel a bit aimless, there is an overarching goal to achieve: defeat four bosses, which unlocks that large door at the start of the castle, wherein you’ll find the final boss. However, beating those four bosses is no easy task. At this point, I’ve taken down one, namely Khidr, the Gatekeeper, in the opening section of the randomly construed castle, and that was only after something like 50+ deaths and enough money to level up my heir to fighting status. Khidr is difficult because it has a projectile attack that spirals around its eyeball body, and there are spikes on the floor to avoid. I did encounter Ponce de Leon, the Sentinel, in the Maya zone, but got my assassin butt handed to me swiftly.

The truth of the matter is that every run is actually more about getting as much gold as possible rather than taking on bosses before you are ready for ’em. All upgrades cost gold, and usually it is a hefty amount–think 500 and higher, at least. Plus, as far as I can tell, the prices continue to increase as you grow in skill. Whatever gold you don’t spend on upgrading the castle can be spent before heading inside. There’s an armorer for weapons/gear and an enchantress for runes, as well as a dude that will lock the previous castle’s layout for you for a price, though it does repopulate with enemies. You have to give up the remainder of your gold before venturing into the castle, though there is an upgrade path to go down that lets you keep a small percentage of it. Regardless, get that gold and upgrade each and every time you die.

Not everything in Rogue Legacy is fascinating. The “story” is told through sporadic journal entries you randomly stumble across, and even then, they aren’t the most exciting or illuminating to read. You’ll occasionally come across a statue in the castle, which you can pray to for assistance, often giving you a bonus ability for that single run; however, unless you know what each power-up is already, there’s no way to know what you got. It’s kind of The Binding of Isaac in that respect. There are also Fairy Chest and special rooms that are purposely difficult or obtuse to solve. Still, even in light of that, it is an internal struggle to not keep playing, to not make one more attempt at that boss or get enough gold for that vampire-themed cape that restores HP with every enemy kill.

Strangely, Rogue Legacy is a game I can play for hours, but I actually load it up rather infrequently. Part of that might be my brain warning me not to lose an entire night to castle raiding, I don’t know. I’m sure I’ll get back to it soon enough, and each run is progress, whether it is getting a new weapon to buy or a permanent upgrade to your MP or actually killing a mini-boss. I’ll get through this in due time. Heck, that’s what genealogy is all about.