Rogue Legacy: Infuriatingly Captivating

Rogue Legacy is a creation birthed by Cellar Door Games (it’s a link to their blog! Go be supportive!). They do other games, such as I have 1 Day, Don’t Shit Your Pants, and My First Quantum Translocator, which are all free to play online. Their biggest success at the moment seems to be Rogue Legacy! You can get it for PS4, PS Vita, Windows, and Linux, particularly on Steam for fifteen dollars. I love what Cellar Door Games has created with Rogue Legacy. It is this genealogical dungeon crawler that you use to slowly kill off all of your family members over time. There are four section of the dungeon, that become progressively harder as you go on, that are great at the killing of your family.

Alright, so that may not be the premise of the game, but it is a genealogical dungeon crawler. You cycle through children from generation to generation choosing one out of three of the next generation to replace your previous character that was unfortunately balding and couldn’t get past the spikes fast enough. Each character choice has special characteristics or attributes. There’s dwarfism, balding, dementia, vertigo, and more for characteristics. These change the funny little things about the game. Dwarfs can get into hidden places, dementia means you occasionally see enemies that aren’t there, dyslexia will do you the great pualsere of jumbling your words for you, and so forth. These are important things to pay attention to and, while extremely useful to the game play, they also offer a great amount of humor to the game.

There are also different abilities that you get to choose from for your character. Not as in ‘you get to go through all the abilities and constantly hand pick your favorite every time.’ Oh no, that would be too kind. Out of the three children, you get to choose based off of the mixture of attributes and the one ability that they happen to have. Maybe one will have blade wall and the other two will have the handy scythes that you can throw around, or one will have the scythes, but the low health mage with vertigo will have flame barrier. It’s really just three randomly generated characters and sometimes your family tree sucks.

Personally, I find flame barrier to be AWESOME!

Aside from the characters there is a nice manor that you can build up that houses (haha) your upgrades! You will want these upgrades. These are paid for with an ever-increasing amount of gold that you will harvest from the dungeon you must enter. Over time you will accumulate a smithy, an enchantress, and an architect who will each have extremely useful things you can buy for an also ever-increasing amount of gold (minus the architect). Be careful to do all of these things before re-entering the dungeon because upon entering you lose all of your profits. This means that over time and the more you buy things, the more gold you will need to continue progressing with upgrades and gear. There will be a time when you realize that that five hundred gold you just murdered innocent candle sticks for is useless to you. It’s a depressing moment. It also forces you to become better. In an I-need-to-put-this-game-down-after-thirty-minutes-or-I’ll-murder-a-pedestrian kind of way.

One of the greatest things about this game is the little throw backs to Cellar Door Games older games. You can just find a large picture frame with a different game on it and it will tell you about how, for example, I have 1 Day is the game favorite from Cellar Door Games. They tell you a little something about the game from the picture you found and it is really quite interesting. Unfortunately if you have dyslexia, you may need to find that one again on a different character!

I think my favorite character combination is a dwarf with flame barrier. I love being a dwarf and getting to hidden chests, but I equally, if not more, love decimating an enemy before it can even touch me. Sometimes it hasn’t even quite registered that it wants to touch me. Seriously, flame barrier is great and works with the low health of a mage which supports my head-on, lets do this without proper thought, play style.

For $15 I can not recommend this game more. It is infuriating with the way that you just die and die and die, but that is the point of the game! It loses comedic value if I just take Sir Taco the First and clear house without ever getting to know Sir Taco Jr. or Sir Taco III. It’s so easy to pick up, clear house, feel like you’ve made progress, and then put down when you need to (and also when you feel dangerous level of animosity towards a rather large skeleton that won’t stop hitting you with his magic bones that he pulls out of thin air).

Have you played Rogue Legacy? What did you think of it? Hit me up in the comments!