Saturday Morning Gaming: Rogue Legacy

One of my buds wrote me about Rogue Legacy: “Hey, Is the purpose of the game to die just to boost up one’s skills and stats? There’s really no purpose in trying to “win” on the first incarnation?”

And it had been years since I opened this game up. What I remembered was a game where it was really rough getting out of the gate and then buying up persistent bonuses to stats until you got into a groove where you could easily make enough gold to buy up more persistent bonuses to stats and then, eventually, you’d beat one of the boss monsters and get a *LOT* of gold and then you’d buy even more persistent bonuses to stats… at which point you’d plateau and put the game down for a few years until one of your friends wrote you about it.

So I went back to it and realized that Elden Ring has, somehow, managed to make me better at games I used to suck at.

Here’s the basic conceit: One of your ancestors betrayed the king. It is now up to you and your descendants to avenge the king by going into a cursed castle and collecting money and buying up persistent bonuses that your next run will benefit from. When you get to the castle door, Charon will take all of your leftover money and you start again from Zero. Then you go into the castle and make money again.

And do it again, and do it again, and do it again.

Every time you die, you pick one of three descendants and each one will have something special about them. One might have color blindness (and the game will be in black and white). Another might have near-sightedness (which means that close monsters will appear fine, the far-away ones will be blurry) or far-sightedness (the opposite). Another might have the trait “balding” which doesn’t really have an impact on the game itself, but it doesn’t let you forget that you’re losing your hair. You might have dwarfism or giantism.

And, if you’re lucky (or good), you get enough gold to upgrade something important like the amount of damage you can do or your hit points. If less lucky (or good), you’ll upgrade something like the amount of mana your spells use. If even less lucky than that, you’ll just go on to the next castle and hope to suck less.

Eventually you’ll upgrade your descendants (Barbarian Kings/Queens instead of mere Barbarians, Hokages instead of Ninjas, and so on) and upgrade your equipment and upgrade your gold find (ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL) and so on and so forth until you get good enough to explore enough of the castle to find where the minibosses are camped out. Once you beat all four, you’ll finally be able to take on the betrayer and avenge your king! And you’ll say something like “oh, yeah… that’s what I was doing”.

I finally beat the game somewhere around descendant 150 and my castle went from looking like this:

To looking like this:

Everything got upgraded at least once and there were a handful of things (such as gold find) that I maxxed out… finding 11 gold is better than finding 10 and finding 12 is even better than that. Going from it taking three hits to kill a monster to it taking two is good, but one-hitting is great. And so on and so forth.

There are a ton of unlocks and a ton of upgrades and if you enjoy feeling frustrated and plateauing and then overcoming that hurdle and upgrading more stuff, then this game has that game loop down pat. It’s $15 on Steam but goes on sale all the time. If you are looking for a fun platformer where you’ll not even think about fighting the end boss until you’ve died 100 times?

Check out Rogue Legacy.

So… what are you playing?