Card-based reverse tower-defense fantasy roguelite with an old-school pixel art style. That sure checks a lot of indie game boxes.

Fortunately, just about every element of Loop Hero is a best-case-scenario:

Card-Based:
If there’s anything I’m uncontrollably repulsed by, it’s card games. Fortunately this barely qualifies, with your “deck” and “cards” acting as stand-ins for tiles on the map, which are constantly getting replenished as you kill enemies. I know that obviously card games use cards to represent other things, but in this case it’s closer to picking a loadout of units in an RTS. Pro game design tip: if you’re going to use cards, make it easy for the Conman to forget that’s what’s going on.

Reverse Tower Defense:
Tower defense games were my jam back when I was 12, and Loop Hero puts a spin on that concept by making you the one marching automatically through the stage. Your job is to place enemy camps along the simple track, allowing the hero to get stronger with more gear and xp. Even divorced from every other element, it’s a proven, simple gameplay loop that’s highly addicting and satisfying.

Fantasy:
The story and setting of loop hero is a contrivance necessitated by the roguelite structure, but there is a central mystery and several characters… which I didn’t care about on almost any level. You could drop it entirely and if anything it would make repeating the boss encounters a few seconds quicker. The fantasy elements do make sense, and even if I wasn’t invested in the plot they at least tried to tell a semi-unique story.

Roguelite:
The procedurally generated aspect of roguelite games can be used as a crutch for producing theoretically ‘infinite’ content. As with all games, they need something to keep the player interested, and Loop Hero actually excels in this area. Not using any outside reading material, there’s a sense of discovery as you mix-and-match units to generate new combinations. The upgrade tree and hub town are mostly just supplemental to the player’s skill and strategy as well as your engagement with the mechanics. I didn’t have too much trouble with grinding for materials, although I also found the gameplay perhaps a little too easy. I found some pretty optimal setups and ran with them, making me feel like an unkillable god by the end. There are worse things than being too easy, like being boring, and this crap is hella addicting even on an easy run. I’ll probably never touch it again but I got everything I wanted out of it from that perspective.

Old-school pixel art style:
Presentationally Loop Hero is pitch-perfect. The limited color palette and crunchy sound design sets it apart from many other pixel indie games, and puts it right up my alley (especially with the included CRT filter). It legitimately gives the game the outward appearance of an early PC game, without the technological gameplay limitations thereof.

Loop Hero. Pretty good indie game. I liked it.

When it comes to run-based games, I'm usually less interested in ones that are too focused on luck and grinding as elements of success. Loop Hero sidesteps this by being essentially a weird hybrid of run-based and idle game, which makes the grinding feel like the point of the game, rather than a thing meant to arbitrarily gate completion from me.

The problem is maybe that it's not a great idle game. As much as the shifting of bottleneck resources is a part of that genre, everything in LH quickly became bottlenecked by a specific resource that can only be obtained via very specific builds, and drops pretty rarely. Still pretty fun, but I'm flagging on chapter 3. Overall, a fantastic gamepass game. Exactly the sort of thing I'm glad I played but also glad I didn't pay for.

Of all the games I expected this to be like, Persona 5 wasn't it. That is to say, there's some neat stuff here - especially aesthetically - but I just can't get past it being such a profound waste of time.

For every hour you spend in Loop Hero, I feel like maybe 10 minutes of it are actually engaging on a gameplay level, placing your blocks, risking your health balance and trying to make synergies work. The other 50 minutes are you waiting around for something to happen. Seriously, that's it. The maximum speed for getting your hero to walk about is way too slow and the battle speed can't be sped up at all, DESPITE YOU LITERALLY HAVING NO CONTROL OVER IT AND IT HAVING LIKE 2 ANIMATIONS AAAA.

And it's really a shame, because the game is pretty neat. The aesthetic and weird horror elements are by far the best thing the game has going for it, lending the whole thing this unique atmosphere which is like a more interesting darkest dungeon, and integrating map building with a deckbuilding game is actually fun and has some great synergy stuff going on at times. I also really like the music.

But yeah it should literally be going 5 times as fast as it does, especially as it can be paused. About 70% of the average run is spent doing micromanagement of your equipment that makes next to no difference BECAUSE THERE'S LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE TO DO.

There's also the shite progression system. If you just unlocked cards and classes, I'd probably be fine with it, but the basebuilding of the camp seems to do nothing but just make it so your early hours have even less things to do than the "complete game", which is effectively hidden behind tens of hours of even worse tedium.

So yeah, there's nuggets of gold here. And if you're into these bullshit skinner boxes whilst listening to a podcast, this will certainly make the hours go. But it's such a fucking waste of time.

If they patch it to go legitimately 3 times as quick or more, I'd consider giving it a go. Until then, avoid.

It's a fun game and a good concept but it overstays its welcome without adding anything new. The game up to chapter 3 is alright but the last chapter is too much of a grind.

This game has a very pleasant atmosphere about nothingness, which I'm surprised isn't mentionned more often. While the story is very minimalistic, the few moments of it are pleasant to go through. The dialogue is well written and the pixel portraits are awesome.

The game's main flaw is how quickly it becomes repetitive because everything major is unlocked early on. It's also easy to discover most possible combinations of cards, so the game gets stale. I honestly feel like the game just... stops. You've discovered everything, you HAVE finished it. Sure, there's a few cards requiring a lot of grind to unlock but you have seen 95% of the content, you have unlocked all classes and base facilities, you are at the last chapter and the next ten or twenty hours are a repeat of the exact same thing. At that point, the game feels incomplete, the gameplay loop starts falling apart.

It doesn't help that the game is very RNG oriented and there's little skill you can develop overtime and there aren't that many strategies either. Perhaps the worst part is the extremely punishing death penalty which slows down your progress, making it a serious grind to beat the final level.

The game is also so slow! Seriously, the maximum speed needs to be raised way higher. Too much of the playtime is just wasted looking at the screen while you can do nothing and there isn't even much in the way of animations to look at.

Loop Hero: O Mestre da Procrastinação! Esse jogo é praticamente um buraco negro para a produtividade. Com seus gráficos pixelizados e trilha sonora envolvente, você começa a construir um mundo enquanto seu herói dá voltas sem fim.

A simplicidade dos visuais esconde uma complexidade viciante. Cada ciclo traz novos desafios, inimigos e a frase constante: "Só mais um loop!" É como se a procrastinação ganhasse vida, disfarçada de construção de mapa estratégica.

Loop Hero é daqueles jogos em que você promete a si mesmo jogar apenas por 15 minutos e, de repente, já são 2 da manhã. Uma mistura irresistível de desafio e curiosidade, este jogo se torna um convite para deixar as responsabilidades de lado e se perder no ciclo interminável da diversão.

After about 10 hours of playtime, I considered throwing in the towel on this one. I'd spent the last several expeditions ramming my head against chapter two. After watching Jorbs play it a little bit however, I picked up on some of the nuance of the game that I had completely missed. The next 20 hours of play time flew by and I loved every minute of it.

I wish the game was a little bit better about explaining its meta-progression: how to aquire certain resources and what those resources are used for. If I hadn't done outside research, I would have quit the game to play something else. That would have been a shame, because this was delightful.

The music and pixel art is so great, also. Placing that last tile, summoning the boss, and having that soundtrack kick in is an AMAZING feeling.

Looove the style on display here. March of the Black Queen SNES vibes in these desolate roguelite playthroughs as grey, green and orange mold weeps over the petri dish of a screen. It's a joy to watch this diseased world slowly take form from nothing. Clicker game aesthetiqks are normally such bright cuddly things (cookie....), all in an effort to be as low mental engagement as possible - but Loop Hero is a FESTERING CORPSE and wants u to know about it.

Anyway the games alright but not my kind of thing what so ever. Far too reliant on sequential stat ups than the player's actual strategy, at the very least in these opening hours. If living, dying, and repeating with a +4% potion potency forever until you beat the next incremental boss sounds tight to you.......... go off and off and off and off!!! I'd rather have master chef on my other monitor.

I'm sure it must get better after 20 or 30 hours, but after several hours in a row of just grinding metal scraps, I think I'm done waiting.

...is how I would have originally opened my review if I had really stopped playing when uninstalling the game out of frustration after nine hours of play. However, I'm not too eager to hate on games, especially ones like Loop Hero that, armed with a zero dollars marketing budget, became so beloved: if so many people came to like it, I wanted to know how it worked and what made it click. Sure enough, my insistence led to an answer, but one that made me more confused rather than less. Strap in, and let's examine why this game has been living in my head rent-free for a while now.

What is Loop Hero, anyway? Its premise is that the world is being erased by a supernatural entity and its remnants are slowly forgetting all that used to exist. You play as a young hero who attempts to resist the destruction, going on expeditions to gather materials and build a village along with other survivors. These expeditions have them looping around a set path on the world map, passing by their camp after every lap. The twist is, although the path through the map might be set, its contents are not: with every battle, the hero earns cards that can be used to place landmarks around the map, like groves, meadows, ruins, etcetera -- as if remembering what the world used to be like before.

These cards, when placed, give boons to the hero, but also cause enemies to appear in their path that could bring an end to their adventure. The goal is to survive long enough to place enough tiles and spawn a boss, whose defeat unlocks the next act of the story. Between expeditions, resources can be used to build new facilities around the village and upgrade the existing ones. In true roguelite fashion, doing so unlocks permanent bonuses for your character, like stat increases, new classes, extra lives and so on, and also unlocks more cards containing different landmarks to assemble a deck with and use in the expedition map.

The game's poetic setting quickly gives way to frustration, as the player is left to reason about Loop Hero's incredibly cryptic mechanics on their own. It’s hard to understand what makes a deck good; the in-game texts explaining cards and stats are vague, when not misleading; and there are hidden interactions that the game does not explain whatsoever. This extends into the expeditions, which make for lengthy gameplay sessions even at max game speed, and should they come to an end through the hero’s death – a highly likely outcome, as enemies also have opaque rules and interactions to them – the player is punished by losing most of the resources gathered.

That’s where the grinding kicks in, as players turn to the one thing they see some progress happening in: the village. By slowly gathering resources over the course of their expeditions, one figures they might accrue enough bonuses to power through the seemingly impossible hordes of enemies. That's where I originally stopped: completely stumped by Act II, at the end of a long grind for Metal Shards that was leading into an even larger grind of Orbs of Evolution. My conclusion was that the game was a grindfest and not worth my time. But was it, really? I eventually started thinking that if the game was truly a grindfest, then speedruns of it must also take hours. A quick search yielded this, which I watched intently.

Later that day, I reinstalled the game and beat it within an hour and a half, finishing the three remaining acts in almost back-to-back runs.

There is no grinding in Loop Hero. There isn't a single point in the game where you have to stop and grind, and doing so it's a consequence of playing the game wrong. Mystery solved! It's a case of, as the kids say, git gud, amirite? Except, nobody plays the game wrong intentionally, they do it because the correct answer is unclear and/or something leads them down the wrong path. What is going on? What is it about Loop Hero that guides people towards ruining their own experiences?

The first factor is the general haziness surrounding the mechanics I previously went over. The second is in the risk-reward ratio heavily skewing towards "risk". A simple example can be found in choosing to end the expedition after finishing a loop: loops grow increasingly dangerous the higher their number, and staying for one more loop and dying would lose you 70% of your total resources. Surviving one more loop would yield 10%, maybe 20% more? Better to play conservatively and do short expeditions. And what about increasing the spawn of enemies? A definite no-no, as it could easily result in death! The game even helpfully gives you the Road Lantern card to prevent spawns from getting out of control!

Which leads me into the third factor that pushes people into “playing wrong”: there are very few ways to play correctly, as Loop Hero offers a very narrow set of viable builds. I'd risk saying two thirds of the game's cards are unusable, which, for a deck builder, where you generally expect most cards to be viable so long as the rest of the deck synergizes with them, is disastrous. Classes, too, seem like they can be built around different stats, but in reality, there are definitive answers to what must be prioritized, if for no other reason that each boss is a specific mechanics check. To say nothing of traits: picking any boss trait whatsoever is making the game harder on yourself as all of them suck, and their presence reduces the chance of rolling the few good ones. In short, if you don’t build everything exactly as the game wants you to, you’ll die, over and over and over again.

Combine these three things and it’s almost inevitable to come to the conclusion that the only way out of this loop (no pun intended) is to grind the difficulty away, playing each expedition super carefully and slowly amassing materials. Never mind that aggressively placing cards and maximizing encounters is the key to success, both in terms of obtaining more cards and equipment that can further the current expedition and in terms of maximizing the materials you bring back to the village: to give a concrete example, before doing research on the game, I was painstakingly obtaining 1~3 Orbs of Evolution per expedition. After fixing my builds, I easily raked 20~40, along with loads of most other resources. This is why I say there’s no grinding: the material yields are far higher than one might expect.

Anyway, mystery solved²! I figured that was how Loop Hero operated. People who like the game are the ones who figure out which builds to use, play aggressively and finish it quickly, and people who dislike the game are the ones who get stuck in the grind. As we can see from the looking at the game's reviews:

- Steam user StaticSpine recommends it, saying “...it overstays its welcome and becomes way too grindy starting from Act III. But the first ~20 hours I had a blast.”
- Steam user technocosm does not recommend it, ”...the progression is slower than most microtransaction-ridden mobile games.”
- Steam user mercenaryai recommends it, ”...quickly becomes a time-wasting grind.”

Ah.

In the end, it’s not so simple: most reviews mention grinding as a defining aspect of the experience, even the positive ones – in fact, to some people, the punishing grind is the enjoyable part of the game. So where does that leave me? With the game still living rent-free in my mind, I suppose. Maybe my assumption that there is a correct, developer-intended way to play the game is wrong, as much as it irks me to think that the grind is an intentional design choice instead of accident. Some people also mention that they enjoy the game because it’s very hands-free, and they use it to keep their minds busy while multitasking, which I guess I understand, though I would definitely pick a less punishing game.

In the end, would I recommend the game myself? The game design field trip was certainly intriguing, but I would have to say “no”. Aside from the very real risk that anyone that plays this will end up farming for hours on end, a deck builder that provides so few viable options is not a very good one. But it is a fascinating game, and there is legitimate untapped potential in the concept: the ideas behind the game are unlike anything I’ve seen before. Maybe a Loop Hero 2 will eventually come up, with better balance and more in-game information, and deliver on all that potential.

Loop Hero is my go-to example when I'm talking about video games as holistic pieces of art. The story, mechanics, music, art direction, and atmosphere all work synchronously to support the thesis of the piece. Whereas other games can have good stories and good mechanics, like Fallout New Vegas, or good stories at odds with their mechanics, like Ni No Kuni, Loop Hero's story is its mechanics and its mechanics are its story. The gameplay loop is integral to the narrative and this makes every system fully engaging because they all have narrative heft. As an idle game it may not be as as engaging or replayable as the best of the best, but it's definitely the best idle game and one of the most artistic games I've ever played. The protagonist should have been nb though...

Ah yes, it is I, the roguelike hater. Who somehow found himself playing yet another roguelike.

To be honest I haven't been playing this for some time now, but was deluding myself into thinking that I was gonna come back to it. The thing is, I still have no patience or interest in the work you have to put on to master a game, which is the end goal of this genre, but I can't deny the inventiveness at play here. Unlike something like Hades, that is perfectly round but at its core very familiar, this specific combination of ideas turned into something truly authentic, and I'm fascinated by it even though it's really not for me.

que experiência...

Loop Hero é arte de mais, seja em história ou ate em gameplay, tudo que esse jogo faz é em intuito de passar sua mensagem

Que bomba, amei cada segundo

This game has a lot of promise and tragically middling delivery. The core concept of automating the boring parts of RPG combat and instead focusing the player's attention on building challenges for the hero to grind on is brilliant, and the vista of exploratory potential that appears the first time you set two tiles next to each other and they combine in an unexpected way is instantly compelling.

The problem is, Loop Hero trips over its own feet at every opportunity. It dangles exploration in front of the player but then punishes them for diving into it by making most tile combinations produce run-endingly powerful enemies. It completely fails to explain important mechanical interactions, a fact made much worse by a dire lack of copy editing which results in the each game concept having multiple different names in different places. And the different classes feel more like difficulty levels than play styles, with a good Necromancer run being a cakewalk and a Rogue run being a struggle at the best of times.

I'm excited that this has entered the cultural conversation, and I'm not sad to have spent a week beating it, but I'm also happy to see the end now that I've beaten the final boss.

Much like the premise of this game, I too am occasionally wiped of my memory and thrust into a formless void of endless recurrence.

However, in my unstoppable cycle, I keep buying roguelikes. Surely, this time I will accumulate the knowledge I need. Instead, my true self is revealed - actually, i'm impatient, lazy, and bad with memorizing details - and I am instantly killed, losing all progress and sent back to the beginning of my cycle. Hey, this roguelike has citybuilding elements! This time this will work for me!

Zach, my dear Potato, let me contribute to your metagame progress. You hate roguelikes, dude. You hate the glacial sense of progression roguelites offer, you hate the frustration of starting over with a clean state after spending hours painstakingly eking out progress, and you definitely hate the wiki-first approach needed to make any serious attempt at victory. It doesn't matter how good the roguelike is. You bounced off of Hades, my guy. It's not the play mechanics, it's not the art style, it's the difficulty and repetition!!! Break free of the samsara!!! Take the materials with you from this run and make 1/19th of the progress needed towards this permanent building awarding +1 to your next decision making roll!

(This game is a work of art and worth the money you pay for it. I just have a difficult relationship with the genre)