The Videogame Corner: Rogue Legacy

Game: Rogue Legacy
Developer: Cellar Door Games
Genre: Platformer, Rogue-like
Releases: 2013 (PC), 2014 (Playstation 3, Playstation 4, PSP), 2015 (Xbox One), 2018 (Nintendo Switch)

Platformers are not really my thing. I can understand why people are playing games of the genre, do not get me wrong, but I tend to grow frustrated by the difficulty of near-impossible jumps are rather than becoming motivated enough to keep trying. However, there is still some DNA of those games in titles that I genuinely enjoy. One example is “Rogue Legacy”, a 2-D platformer with a grinding component in which you take on the challenge of a massive dungeon in order to clear the name of your family; all while collecting money to improve your character(s), die during the run, and then try again with the offspring of your former character. The game is pretty challenging, but the fact that every try helps a little to make things go smoother next time is enough motivation for me to keep the runs going; and eventually succeed at killing the man that tarnished the family name in the first place. So, for the twentieth post this (Bl)August, let me tell you about “Rogue Legacy”.

The story of “Rogue Legacy” is simple: The game starts with a flashback to the knight Johannes, the first character to start your long lineage of castle clearing and monster bashing. In the sepia-toned tutorial level, you get to know the basics of how to steer your character, meaning movement and attacking. After a short section inside the castle, you end up in the throne room, with a king standing at the far end of the room. A button prompt asks you to press attack, you press the button, and Johannes the knight has become a kingslayer. The reasons to why Johannes killed the king remain unknown for the time being, but to clear the name of your dynasty, you need to confront the traitor, which means getting to him through the various dungeons ahead of you. The story of Johannes is told to you via diary entries that you can find in the dungeons, but for the time being your main focus is actually surviving the gauntlet in front of you.

In “Rogue Legacy”, you do not simply play one character but rather an entire bloodline of knights. Upon dying against the various perils the castle has to offer, your character may succumb but your descendants will take up the slack for their fallen family member. The game basically restarts, giving you the option to pick one out of three characters, and challenge the castle anew. However, your characters are not all the same, but instead invested their time honing different skills; and this is where classes come into play. Each class has a base version and an upgraded version. The upgrade will introduce a new skill to each class, but the basic gameplay pretty much stays the same. The classes are:

• The Knight/Paladin is the jack of all trades-character and enters the fray with a shield that allows them to block opposing attacks rather than dodging them.
• The Barbarian/Barbarian King/Barbarian Queen has more health than any other class at the cost of lower damage and little magic ability, and can do a “Skyrim”-esque shout to shove back enemies.
• The Mage/Arch Mage class is magic-focussed, meaning less physical prowess higher mana and magic ability, and can switch through various spells after being upgraded.
• Knaves/Assassins are the rogue class of the game, work well with crits and can temporarily turn into mist to avoid enemies.
• The Shinobi/Hokage class is equally squishy as the Knave/Assassin, but instead of scaling with crits the class cannot crit at all but has higher damage output in general.
• The Miner/Spelunker(ette) is not talented in combat at all, but instead fetches more gold from all sources which could make picking them worthwhile if you need some easy money.
• The Lich/Lich King/Lich Queen are an unusual magic option that starts with low health but gains permanent extra maximum health per kill; which can later be used to increase the mana pool via their skill.
• The Spellthief/Spellsword is yet another magic user, but one that profits from going into melee since 30% of the damage inflicted in melee is added to your mana. After the upgrade, they can also cast spells as empowered versions for double the mana.
• The Dragon is the last class that you can unlock via normal means. This class comes with a permanent fly mode and trades the usual melee attacks against fireballs. The fireball projectiles do cost mana, but the Dragon also regenerates mana at a very fast rate.
• There is also the Traitor class, functionally the final boss as a playable character, which comes with three special spells that only that class can use. The Traitor class cannot be bought via the normal menu but is unlocked after a number of boss challenges.

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You do not start with all those classes unlocked though. In order to improve your chances of clearing the enemies in the castle, you need to invest the money found during your run in the upgrade menu. The choice of options to invest into is rather small at the start of the game, but the more you manage to level the more you will be able to invest into making future runs more successful. Unlocking classes, improving stats, becoming more money efficient, or even gaining access to the services of various NPCs is all unlocked by spending the spoils your ancestor found during his journey before his inevitable demise. Apart from leveling your character via upgrades, you can also improve their gear by finding blueprints and runes during the runs. The blueprints can be made into armor that comes with its own fair share of bonuses, with the slight inconvenience requiring upgrades in order to wear them and the fact that you look like a clown if you mix them for various bonuses. Placing runes in your armor can give significant improvements to your abilities like healing yourself when killing enemies, more jumps, a hover mode, or damage reflection, but becomes increasingly more expensive which in turn requires you to get more money.

To spice things up, you not only have various character classes and the aforementioned improvements available but you also need to work with the specific talents and flaws every single one of your family members comes with. There is a long list of quirks that not only change how to tackle individual playthroughs, but also open new strategies to clear some rooms. A character with “Gigantism” is bigger than usual, which makes dodging opposing attacks and not getting in contact with spikes a tad more tricky; however, you also have increased attack range due to your size, which is definitely a nice bonus to have. The direct opposite, “Dwarfism”, makes you small enough to not just dodge projectiles much easier, but also gives you access to small gaps in the wall which lead to treasure or allow you to skip trapped rooms entirely; at the price of having terrible attack range, naturally. You can be bulky enough to become completely immune to knockback with “Endomorph”, faster than the usual character with “ADHD”, or send enemies flying with “Hypergonadism”. On the flipside, you might be “Near-sighted”, which makes hard to see anything beyond a small area of vision around you, “Color-blind” which makes the entire game black and white, or have “Alzheimers” which means you have no access to your map due to your general forgetfulness.

However, the developers of “Rogue Legacy” certainly had some fun designing those traits, since some of them are completely irrelevant to the run and only change minor details. If your character suffers from “Baldness”, the helmet plume is removed for the run and the loading screen will display “Balding” instead of “Loading”. If your character has the “Dyslexia” trait, they will still be able to read journal entries you can find in the castle, but the text itself will be some muddled nonsense. “I.B.S.” will cause you hero to fart when jumping or dashing, while the trait “Coprolalia” will cause the character to curse whenever they take damage, portrayed by a small speech bubble appearing near them. The variety of traits paired with the various classes makes choosing a character a fun endeavor; unless you rolled a character with “Vertigo”, in which case you can basically run into a spike trap and start with another character since an upside-down world is not a world I want to do platforming in.

My Hokage having loads of fun with the first room of “Castle Henson” in New Game+.

With all your money spent, it is time to take on the dungeon. There are four areas in total: The “Castle Hamson” is the starting area and the normal-looking castle part of the entire dungeon. After you cleared the castle or are up for a challenge, you want to head east to the “Forest Abkhazia”. The third area is “The Maya”, which can be found by heading up in the castle area. And lastly, the most difficult area in “Rogue Legacy” is “The Darkness”, which is situated below the main castle. All of those areas consist of various rooms filled with monsters and traps that you need to overcome. Traps are actually the easier part to learn, since there are only a few: Holes in the ground normally suggest spike traps, which will shoot out after a brief moment if you get in contact with the floor titles; running across them is normally fine though. The next trap comes in form of fireball shooting turrets, which can be found at walls, floors, and ceilings and fire their projectiles in regular intervals. Depending on the setup of the room, those turrets can fire faster or slower, but you normally have a way to avoid the fire by careful movement. And the last trap you encounter are spiked steel balls which simply float around and will turn into the other direction upon contact with a surface; and can also be avoided by moving around them. A fun little strategy I found while playing is using Retaliation Runes against the traps: Since traps do count as enemies, they do still have health; but you cannot attack them. Cue the retaliation rune, which returns damage they inflicted to you back upon them. With just two runes, you do 100% of the damage you received against the trap in question, which will kill it, grant you some gold and potentially even heals you if you play with Vampire Runes or max health if you use the Lich class.

Naturally, traps are not the only enemies you will have to face; and “Rogue Legacy” has a colorful pot of opponent’s that will try to murder you. Small flying mages in various colors that shoot magic, eyeballs shooting bloody tears that can travel through walls, knights with various equipment that will try to stab, smash, or block your attacks, slimes that split into smaller versions of themselves when killed, and many more. Learning how to approach and fight against the variety of enemies is required to progress, and while you might think that a pattern of simply one attack might be boring to fight against, I invite you to tackle a room with a variety of different monsters all unleashing their (un-)coordinated fire in your direction. The further you get in the game, the more challenging the opponents will become for obvious reasons. While a recolor of some slime you fought in the forest might not garner any respect from you at first, it will quickly overwhelm you by not only splitting as usual but also leaving flames behind to damage you. I do not mind those recolors and slight changes to the monsters as an indicator for it being more dangerous since I find the enemy design rather charming. Combined that with the fact that some room layouts can transform easy monsters into serious challenges and I would say that Cellar Door Games has done a fine job with the dungeoneering part of the game.

“Where is that dripping sound coming from?” – Lady Annabelle, last words

The reason to even run through all of the dungeons is to unlock the door at the start to get into the throne room. Each of the areas has an area boss and only after defeating them all are you allowed to face Johannes. The four bosses are all versions of normal monsters in the game, but amped up to eleven since they use the normal attack mechanic of the small version but make them big and way more dangerous. The eye boss, Khidr, can not only shoot one or a few bloody tears, but instead fires barrages of projectiles. And the slimey Herodotus can split quite a few times, which increases the amount of enemies on the screen with every monster you kill. And if you just blast through the content of “Rogue Legacy” and wish to face a more difficult challenge, then there is New Game+ for you which bumps up the difficulty slider by quite a few notches and can keep the player entertained for even longer.

“Rogue Legacy” is the perfect mix of ingredients. A colorful and fun premise as the game’s scenario, well-designed enemies to challenge the player, loads of options for your character to make the build you can work with best, and a resource-gathering system that actually gives you the feeling of accomplishing something and your character noticeably getting stronger. It is a solid time waster for about 15 hours and comes with the huge upside that you can also decide to play one run for about ten minutes and then do something else again, unlike many other games in which you need to commit quite a lot of time. “Rogue Legacy” is available on Steam for 11.50€ at the moment, which is a fair price to pay for the game on offer; and even if you do not want to spend that much money, there is always the next Steam sale at the horizon.