Gary Chang resides in a 344 square foot flat in Hong Kong. Furthermore, because Gary Chang is an architect, he has taken a room that is essentially appropriate for one and made it become every room in the home as needed. Bedroom? Take the bed off. In the kitchen, slide back a wall to see a sink and a cooktop. Bath? Take down another wall. utility and laundry? Pull: I understand.
Last night, I watched an excellent documentary on Chang’s flat. By the time it was over, I had the following thought: Hey, perhaps this is how we all think about house stuff? Perhaps Chang should adopt an etch-a-sketch lifestyle. Imagine creating a space centered around your passions and nothing else. Choose a house that you can only slip into place when you want it to.
I then spent today playing Loot River, in a harmonic way, if a little strange type of harmony. Loot River is a top-down, somewhat Souls-esque roguelite that is both creative and incredibly gratifying. These are plentiful in number. However, Loot River has a really good proposal, one that Chang could even find acceptable. As you travel about with the left stick, you may move the tile you’re on with the right, sliding it across the water from one place to another. The game takes place on floating tile dungeons; tetrominos put you in the correct frame of mind, but there are numerous more forms.
While doing all of this, you’ll be hacking and slashing (soul-slashing combat with powerful swings, parries, and a button-stab lock-on), searching for treasure, leveling up, and obtaining stronger armor and weapons, and finally dying, losing everything, and having to start again. It’s excellent.
It turns out that a hacking and slashing game benefits greatly from the ability to change the floor. Roguelites need hypervigilance, which fits in nicely when you can shift the area of your surroundings that you’re presently standing on and pay close attention to what else is around you.
This genre frequently deals with knowing when to interact and when to stay out of it. Therefore, even while there are many clever movement challenges involving the tiles—such as rearranging floorplans to bypass obstacles or locating the proper piece to let you explore a new area of the map—I spend the most of my playing time moving tiles and considering my next move in terms of fighting.
Really, it’s similar to a roguelike in which you go about on a Routemaster. Let’s say I’m safe on my tile and there are eight nasty guys on a nearby tile. Perhaps I go up, let a few bad guys in, and then quickly run back out of the way to kill them by distancing myself from the main crowd. Perhaps I interconnect and disconnect tiles as if they were circuitry, keeping everything moving and transforming the situation into a kind of factory plan of devastation where I destroy adversaries at a pace that works for me.
Master Routers! Electricity There are a lot of opposing comparisons, but that should come as no surprise in a game that throws in well-known elements like roguelikes! Tetrominoes! – in a novel way combined.
Chuck encounters a variety of foes whose grimy, sherberty pixelart makes them genuinely repulsive. Lurkers! Eaters and runners! People with swords of different colors! Chemical bombs! dreadful employers! They’d be entertaining to play in any game, I believe, but you get really crazy possibilities when you can zip up on a convenient patch of flooring and then go away again. When should I interact? Which way to go? Which angle should one initially approach from?
You have something unique when you add magic, various weapons, and artifacts that let you alter the game in certain ways. In this specific roguelite, the advancement mechanism is facilitated by both magic and weaponry, which are the subtlest of touches. Gain experience points, earn money, gear that improves your attributes, and perhaps even a few devastating specials, like a feather (my personal favorite) that lets you appear on the other side of your opponent after you’ve dealt them a blow. That’s all gone when you die. None of it is able to travel with you.
Any weapons or spells that you’ve unlocked by accumulating Knowledge, which you can exchange for cash at the stores in the main hub in between levels, are what you can sort of bring with you. But even this isn’t that easy; after using Knowledge to unlock spells and weapons, the program randomly assigns them to you at the beginning of a new run without letting you choose or have any control over it. You spend Knowledge to increase the number of possible ways, but that’s all. Naturally, when you pass away, you also forfeit whatever knowledge you haven’t yet used. It aggravates me.
All in all, I believe it’s brilliant: ruthlessly cruel yet clever and endearing. I adore the fact that I spend a lot of time floating down the river, pondering whether to bring my small, secure tetromino up against the next visible patch of land, where I may find eight monsters. I adore how small details like a fire trap that spreads, an opponent who ties tiles together until they are destroyed, or a tile that is higher than the others and must be accessed by stairs can completely change the game.
I adore a full screen of accessibility settings, such as adjustable font size, platform and opponent outlines, screen shaking, colorblind mode, vibration and user interface adjustments, and an easy mode that lowers enemy hit points. I adore enigmatic settings with a central point surrounded by sculptures of human parts and bone-strewn lawn. The sea that the tiles in the game scud across has an oily sheen that I adore. It has slow ripples, light that has been broken up into fuzzy specks, and the splash and lap of a miserable tide. I adore the music’s eerie drone.
In a decent roguelite, you know that time when you’ve pushed yourself too far yet you’ve also earned big money that you don’t want to lose before you can bank it? In the end, this is what Loot River is designed for: Fearfully eyeing my little health indicator, I rush from one tile to the next, breaking off from a small continent and an archipelago of flaming wood, and then looking, searching for the level’s exit. A procedural dungeon crawler in which the previously jumbled levels may be rearranged? Gary Chang would be pleased.