Review: Loop Hero Is an Addictively Hopeful Game of Adaptation and Reaction

The world is all but gone in Loop Hero. It’s a featureless black void except for one solitary path for your nameless hero to tread. One day bleeds into the next, each near-indistinguishable dawn spawning mindless slime creatures to claw at his heels. From the game’s zoomed-out view, you can see that the path is circular, inevitably snaking back to the starting campfire with not a single branching route in between.

As if to underscore the recursive futility of surviving in this uniquely emptied post-apocalypse, of pushing forward while knowing full well that you’re not going anywhere, the game’s hero moves independently on this path with no input from the player. He already knows the way, because there is, after all, only one way. The battles against things like the slime, too, are reminiscent of a turn-based RPG where the turns are automatically taken for you as progress bars fill up for fighters to perform their only available action: attack.

The ingenious hook behind this RPG from Russian developer Four Quarters instead asks us to manage what the hero accumulates through his automatic journey, from the expected rewards of better equipment to cards that represent memories of the world that once was. Placing a mountain card on the blank map will create one from the ether and boost the hero’s health. Placing a grove on his path will let him harvest wood on each pass, one of many resources to be used in the slow rebuilding process when he returns to camp and the world beyond once again darkens and empties of everything you’ve built. By mingling the familiar setting of the fantasy roguelike with mechanics that emphasize a detachment and repetition, Loop Hero functions as a statement of persistence in the face of the seemingly insurmountable.

Of course, it also helps that the game is craftily addictive. It nudges you to keep playing cards because, with every one that you throw down and every new location that you add into the mix, the greater the hero’s potential resource haul upon his return to camp, either by conscious retreat or by force when creatures overwhelm him. Because the process of remaking the world also means resurrecting its potential dangers: A grove spawns a vicious rat-wolf every few days, while swamps are laden with huge mosquitoes and cemeteries are prone to raising skeleton warriors. Likewise, each card slowly fills the bar that triggers a difficult boss battle that allows you to progress further into Loop Hero, but the penalty for death is quite steep, nixing a full 70% of the resources you gathered. And while it’s possible to retreat from any map square, the home campfire is the only space that allows players to leave with all of their resources rather than forfeiting a smaller yet still painful 40%.

In this way, Loop Hero becomes something of a management game in the guise of a pixelated RPG, where you carefully weigh the accumulated danger of playing certain cards and taking care to space out the really difficult spots to give the hero the best possible chance. You have to constantly consider whether an immediate retreat is necessary or if it’s worth risk to push for either the boss battle or a consequence-free exit all the way on your base camp.

Loop Hero does fall prey to some of the frustrations endemic to the roguelike genre, and in some cases those problems are exacerbated by its own twists on the template. Like anything built on randomization, sometimes you’ll simply be dealt a bad hand. But where a lot of roguelikes let you squeak by based on strategy or reflexive mastery of its systems, Loop Hero’s largely automated nature might leave you with little choice but to grit your teeth through a dreary run that sticks you with lousy gear and none of the cards you need. Worse, the severe resource penalties can make the game quite a grind, particularly as it nears the end.

And yet, so much of what makes Loop Hero great comes from its harshest edges, the palpable sense of danger that the hero might not make it back and that, after all options have been exhausted, you can’t do much more than sit back and fret. This is a game where you fumble for answers in the dark, where the rules are never neatly laid out because you’re meant to organically discover them. Many cards have unexpected, unadvertised interactions with one another, like how placing mountain cards close together will form a mountain peak that provides a health boost but also spawns harpies that can fly to any part of the hero’s path, potentially upending whatever careful balance you’ve cultivated. Through repeated trials, you experiment and intuitively figure out some way to manage an ever-evolving situation. Loop Hero is a curiously hopeful game of adaptation and reaction, where you struggle to optimize a thing that rebels at the very concept of optimization: the world itself.

This game was reviewed using a review code provided by Tinsley PR.