Gaming reviews
This charming micro RPG is one of this year’s first true gems.
High-performance playtime
From the moment its 16-colour title screen fades in alongside dramatic chiptunes, Loop Hero feels like some forgotten, VGA-era fantasy RPG, a game that contains the mystery and difficulty of 1991, gently modernised to 2021. Behind that charming intro screen isn’t empty, indulgent nostalgia, but a novel gameplay format that’s strangely engrossing, considering much of your time playing Loop Hero is hands-off. I want more games like this.
The setup is dead-simple: you send one of three heroes (warrior, rogue, or necromancer) on repeated expeditions to an empty road. As your little hero autowalks around this stone path, you populate the blank world around it by playing cards like graveyards, battlefields, villages, or mountains one by one. These pieces in turn alter hero or enemy stats like attack speed and HP, and spawn corresponding enemies that you fight as you pass through them.
Each run essentially becomes a small experiment, another crack at piecing together a level that’s tough enough to give you good XP, resources and gear but not so brutal that it kills you outright. What happens if I play a bunch of spider cocoons and sand dunes, which lower all creatures’ HP? What will river cards do if I intersect them with the road itself? Can my warrior survive two adjacent tiles filled with giant sandworms?
Loop Hero is about tending this little gauntlet. It’s unexpectedly fun to have zero control over combat and worry mostly about arranging these little tiles. My favourite design element within Loop Hero’s build-your-owndungeon concept are the hidden effects that trigger when you play certain cards. Drop nine mountain cards in a 3x3 grid and they transform into a massive Everest-like peak, granting a mega boost to max HP. But, surprise: harpies now live in the mountain you built, a challenging enemy type that will fly down to a random part of your board every few days.
Loop Hero is the concentrated experience of watching numbers get bigger in a videogame, but it’s a grimly enchanting one. Its biggest point of success is that it makes a home in this middle zone between watching, planning, and acting. Supporting each and every moment is some excellent music and sound design – scraping slashes, a giant mosquito’s buzz, the clattering sound of a skeleton reanimating. This is the sort of smart, focused resurrection of old games I want more of, something that feels retro and new with every expedition step. I managed to put more than 40 hours into this quote-unquote small game. EVAN LAHTI
Loop Hero has the spirit of early ’90s fantasy games, cleverly revived in an original and digestible form.