Storming the Castle is Fun for the Whole Family.
My first experience with Rogue Legacy was watching my friend Jean-Luc struggle against this giant skull demon thing named Alexander. I sat for several hours and watched him die and die and die again out of the corner of my eye while working on homework. After a half hour or so, he gave up and charged out into the greater castle, killed a whole slew of demons, died a dozen more times, found the door to Alexander’s area again, and spent another half hour beating his head against a wall until finally the dread cranium was defeated. It looked like one of the most challenging and frustrating rpgs I’d ever seen. Naturally, I had to try it.
Steam’s winter sale rolled around and lo and behold Rogue Legacy was on a discount. Purchase, Download, Install, god I love steam. I start the game up and run through the sepia opening cutscene. Not 100% sure what’s going on, but it seems like I’m a hero who has to enter a Castle and find some kind of treasure to cure the ailing King. Time flashes forward a bit and I choose a new hero. Walk into the castle. Use what feel like pretty standard metroid-vania controls to navigate a treacherous, spiky, platform environment, defeating demons with my trusty sword and a slew of magicks.
And then die. Sir Hero is hit by one too many fireballs, and he passes away, leaving nought but a paltry handful of gold and a painting in his memory. No checkpoint, no restoring last save. But before Sir Hero entered the Castle, he had three children: these children are randomly assigned a gender, a class, a spell, and between 0 and 2 randomized ‘traits’. Leaving Sir Hero behind, I select a Knave named Sir Taco, and he’s dyslexic. Taco navigates the castle with startling precision, but when he tries to read a sign, the letters are scrambled.
After Taco meets with his brutal end comes Lady Shanoa the Barbarian, who is near-sighted, making the outer edges of the screen blurry. Taco amassed a few hundred gold in his abbreviated rampage, and before Shanoa enters the castle she may spend his coin on permanent upgrades that are applied to every character you play, forever. Upgrades slowly become more and more expensive, but you’ll be getting plenty of gold. You can increase most of your base stats, and also buy new classes to be randomly assigned to your descendents. Each class has different health, mana, and damage ratios, and unique abilities.
A score of unfortunate children in, you’ll find the doorway to Khidr, first guardian of the castle. Each zone has a guardian, and the goal of the game is to kill all four guardians to unlock the big golden door at the beginning of the castle. After another score of unfortunate children, Khidr will lie in ruins and you may continue on your merry way.
The volume of character variations and ability combinations you can collect in this game means no two runs are ever even remotely the same, and there’s an entire castle to pillage and explore, with dozens of cool collectibles to find. For the price of an Indie game, Rogue Legacy feels like a very strong rpg-platformer, hearkening back to the good old days of the game boy advance, reminding me of good times had in games like Aria of Sorrow. For the quirky humor, nostalgic yet invigorating gameplay, and days worth of fun, I would recommend Rogue Legacy as a welcome light-hearted distraction to anyone, and a fairly intense challenge for the die-hard fans. (Next I have to figure out how to beat Volgarr the Viking, which makes this game look like a picnic)
