But Rogue Legacy makes it work so well by scaling its difficulty to adapt to your increasingly buff knights. This will be anathema to many Rogue purists, who see the punishing difficulty and chance of losing everything as the core of the genre's appeal. The abilities straddle the funny and practical – coprophilia's always a laugh So the game keeps on changing, but your big achievements (and even the little ones) stay permanent. These seem contradictory approaches, but Rogue Legacy's solution is to make each run at the castle feed into an overarching hoard of family goodies – that is, all the gold and kit and upgrades stay in place, and pass on from parent to child. In Metroidvania games, persistent progression is key.
Phantasmagoria game over how to#
The appeal of Rogue-like games is in learning how to play – so that each fresh attempt at the dungeon sees you get a few inches further. There is no shortage of games that randomly smoosh together niche genres in the hope they're somehow onto a hit, but in Rogue Legacy's case the blend is brilliant. But equally I love picking the spelunker for a change of pace, plumbing the deepest depths to snuffle out as much gold as possible and avoiding fights altogether. The idea of controlling heirs could have been a cosmetic way of giving the player infinite lives, but the importance of classes and abilities soon become crucial – a damage-dealing hokage with dwarfism and no sensation in his or her feet (so spikes don't hurt) is my personal dream ticket. That's not the only thing that changes: each of your character's children will be of different classes (archmage? miner? shinobi?) and with different attributes (dwarfism, OCD, colour-blindness). When your character dies you're given a choice of three heirs with which to start over, in a newly randomised castle. Enemies include a toothy mimic disguised as a treasure chestĭeath is not the end in Rogue Legacy it's a new and better beginning. Rogue Legacy: another major influence is the peerless Dark Souls. And in the end, every single one will fall to the castle's macabre lineup of enemies – lurid skulls, flame-hooved horses, corrupted nobility, giant eyeballs and other vicious phantasmagoria. The sword-swinging combat seems simple at first, but soon your knights begin developing into precision-based swiss army knives. You control a knightly figure and explore as far into the dread environments as possible. Rogue Legacy, then, is Metroidvania in a castle of ever-moving parts. Its defining features are random generation and punishing difficulty – it's a different game every time. Rogue Legacy is one of them but it also, following in the footsteps of Spelunky (see below), brings in DNA from early 80s game Rogue. The fact this word even exists speaks to how the basics of this design have been expanded and embellished by a succession of heirs. This rather ugly designation comes from two 8-bit games, Nintendo's Metroid and Konami's Castlevania if you've played a platformer with a map, destructible scenery, backtracking or an upgradeable main character, that's Metroidvania. The dominant influence on Rogue Legacy is a genre of platformer long ago christened Metroidvania. The only thing that matters in either case, of course, is whether the thing stands up. Such is Rogue Legacy, a 2D platformer that builds on classic gaming genres to create something new a kind of portmanteau, and a reference-spotter's dream. Imagine someone started talking about how castles were built – except, before meeting them, you'd never heard of stone.