Cellar Door Games’ Rogue Legacy, as has been said before, is like a retro Souls game. In what looks like a fairly standard pixel-art Action/RPG title holds an impressive amount of depth, complexity, easter eggs, and great gameplay.
I’ve been hearing about the game since it debuted on the PC and it never really piqued my interest. As someone who has played games all their life, I have a tendency to sleep on RPG titles despite having slipped some time into Demon’s Souls. I bought Rogue Legacy on a whim, because I really wanted to buy a new game and download it in a few minutes.
Rogue Legacys new idea is in its name: you control multiple sons of daughters of the same familial legacy, descending from the character you play in the tutorial. Each descendant once dead has three offspring, and upgrades, equipment, and leveling transfers between generations. They conform to a class system of Paladins, Knaves, Mages, or Barbarians but through the upgrade system you unlock class upgrades and new classes like the Shinobi, Miner, or Lich.
Most interestingly is the trait system. If your character has ADHD, they move faster. If they have OCD, they gain mana from breaking all the chairs, barrels, tables etc in a room. If they’re clumsy, they break everything in their path without the swing of a sword. From sexual preferences to nostalgic inclinations, the traits are always interesting.
True to the former half of the games name, it has been described by Cellar Door Games as a rouge-like-like. Every castle is different, with a few exceptions to that rule. The two starting screens are always the same, the castles tower is always up, the underworld is always down, and the forest is always to the far right. The castles are big, though, and I spent about four of five hours in the game before I even ended up in one of the sections.
On its face the gameplay is fun, fast paced, and extremely difficult. More than once I would run into a castle and just be swarmed by enemies and murdered. Once have I ended up in a secret room of the castle and had two giant skeleton monsters kill me before I could escape. Weird things like that though are maybe my favorite part of Rogue Legacy. I would be running from room to room on some grand adventure, and then I would find myself in an empty room with a colorful vintage jukebox that would allow me to change the in-game music. I’ve found a clown with a carnival tent that’s part of an axe-throwing minigame. I was watching my fiancee play it for the first time and in her first castle, she found something I hadn’t ever came across before in the game. Then she came across something else I had never seen before.
The games skill tree is represented by a castle, and as you select upgrades you build towers, trees grow, windows are put in, and it makes the otherwise daunting skill tree of so many RPG’s a little bit easier. It makes me want to progress vertically and see all the game has to offer before I do things like max out stats.
The gameplay is fast. Lots of sword slashing and evading enemies, which is a tall order since about half of them can fly, and many who can’t fly have projectile attacks. The floors, walls, and ceilings often have spikes. Except in rooms with no enemies, safety is seldom found and I’ve never found a way to really exploit any enemy. I’m forced to be on the move because even if I can escape a Frosten because their ice attack can’t penetrate walls, the Eyeball scouts fireball can.
If playing for seven minutes, dying, and then jumping back in sounds repetitive, it is. While the gameplay is very good, it’s a lot of jumping, flashing, and simple projectile spells. I’ve encountered bosses upwards of twenty times and lost, which isn’t so much frustrating as it is fatiguing. It’s easy to keep playing once I was playing, but it wasn’t like the game stopped me on a cliffhanger at any point I would have the occasional great run and that’s exciting, but I never felt thrilled playing. I liked being a knight fighting through this castle full of monsters, but I was immersed in the same way I can get immersed in the old Namco arcade Tower of Druaga. I was way into Rogue Legacy, but I wasn’t seeing a great story unfold, which is a weird choice for an RPG.
Rogue Legacy is a special game because it walks a line. It’s great for people who are really into pixel-art indie fare because it’s fun to pick up. It’s easy to play, just impossible to win. It’s great for people who are really into RPG’s like the Souls games. It’s an incredible feat to do both of those things in one game, and keep it all so cleanly put together. It’s a game that gives you just enough to make you feel like you’re on an adventure. It pulled me in and let me immerse myself in each castle, when most games with pixel-art are simply content with saying “Hey, look at this pixel art! Remember games? We bet you do!”. It’s a retro game without being a simple throwback, and it does everything it wants to do, with a lot of surprises and only a handful of negatives. Along with counterparts like Super Meat Boy and Fez, it’s the zenith of this particular style of indie revival, and definitely warrants the asking price.