I beat Loop Hero recently. It is an excellent game with a core gameplay loop that is addictive and engaging. You play as – or perhaps, manage – a hero in a world that has been forgotten (literally) and walk around a circular path placing tiles. Each tile provides both opportunity and danger, often in the form of enemies to fight. The hero automatically battles monsters (with no input from the player) and receives equippable loot that modifies their stats. Once you die or retreat, you return to your camp and use resources acquired during the expedition to improve your base. Then you embark on another journey.
The best part of the game for me was tile placement. What makes tile placement engaging is the interactions between tiles. Some tiles transform others; if you put a meadow next to something else, it will become a blooming meadow, increasing its healing by 50%. Other tiles complement each other very well; swamps make healing lethal, and vampires heal their allies, so it makes sense to place vampires by the swamp. With over fifty different tiles, exploring the rich heuristic tree of tile placement and synergies was what kept me returning to the game.
Tile design in Loop Hero follows the principle that every choice should provide both risk and reward. There are very few tiles that are pure upside; nearly all of them pose some threat to the hero, and the challenge is finding ways to mitigate the danger so you can enjoy the reward. This is a tried and true principle of game design, and it is executed very well here. I think my favorite example is the smithy, a building that consumes unused items to give you a defensive buff, spawning a golem after the sixth. The cleverest part is that killing the golem gives you six items that are often more valuable than the ones you lost, so you are punished for your greed but rewarded for facing the punishment.
The game also features three types of heroes to choose from, each with radically different mechanics. When I realized that the third hero was the final one, I was disappointed that there weren’t more. But as I kept playing, I came to appreciate the stark differences between them. Each hero has a central, unique mechanic, and the same tile might have very different implications for different heroes. For example, the first hero gets stronger the longer the battle takes, so a tile that reduces everybody’s attack speed is better for him than for the other heroes. The different hero-tile interactions added another dimension to the tile placement subgame, which kept things fresh even when I used the same tiles in each game.
Four Quarters made an excellent decision in using idle-style combat with no player inputs. Players will often fight dozens of monsters in a given loop, and having to make combat decisions would slow the game down to unbearable levels. Removing choices from battles leaves more time for tile placement. This is a useful general principle- whenever you have two subgames, and the first is much less engaging than the second, paring down the former gives players more time to focus on the latter.
I wish that inventory management had received the same treatment as combat, though. The hero has several item slots and the loot that you equip buffs different stats. You have to ask yourself questions like, “is 20% evasion better than 5% vampirism and 8 defense?” Each item has a numerical level as a rough guide to its strength, but sometimes your strategy may require a lower-level item with the buffs you want over a higher-level one irrelevant to your build. One benefit of the system is that it helps the player identify with the hero. Eventually, however, the constant need to compare item stats begins to feel math-y and tedious. I found inventory management to be the least compelling part of the game.
The other main subgame involves building your camp between runs. Much like expeditions, building your camp involves placing tiles on a square grid with placement mattering for certain tiles. For example, the Farm produces one food resource for each of its surrounding tiles that is empty. Constructing buildings is the primary way you spend resources gained during an expedition. Base-building is fun, but only in the same way that incremental improvements between games are satisfying in any roguelite. Players like progression and like seeing numbers go up. Letting them build a base to increase their numbers is difficult to get wrong.
Within the base-building subgame is another subgame where you can craft and equip special non-inventory “camp items” between expeditions. Initially, these confused me because the effects of each item were so weak. For example, the Loaf of Bread only gives you +10 HP (for reference, the total HP for the hero rises from the low hundreds to over a thousand by the end of an expedition). However, as you upgrade your camp you gain more and more camp item slots, so you might eventually equip 30 Loaves of Bread for a respectable boost of 300 HP. This is fun in the late game where it provides highly granular customizability to your hero but is less relevant early on when you can’t equip enough camp items to make a difference. Overall, I would prefer stronger items and fewer slots. I didn’t feel that I needed the level of control that the game gave me, and redoing my build was tedious.
Foreshadowing is important in single-player games, and Loop Hero does a great job of foreshadowing everything. Since players create the obstacles, they are very aware of what they will be facing. Progress bars provide clear reminders of how close the player is to facing the boss or reaching the next day, and the loop-based structure of the environment allows them to predict that the next loop will be similar in many ways to the last.
There is something powerful about loops in games. There is a great article about the roguelike game Unexplored that sums up why they work so well:
Interconnecting spaces are a good thing because they naturally bring you back to where you started, helping you to feel your character developing. When you return to familiar surroundings with a new item or weapon you tend to realize the difference between how you were before and how you are now, and get a handle on your hero’s journey.
Alex Wiltshire, How Unexplored generates great roguelike dungeons
In Loop Hero, each new turn around the map sees you facing the same challenges as before, but with new gear and new tiles to shake things up, providing a strong feeling of progression.
Overall, I found Loop Hero to be both rewarding and educational as an example of good game design. After beating the game and seeing almost all of the content, I don’t feel much of an urge to keep playing, but I am sure I will want to return if Four Corners releases any more content.