A new game is out called Rogue Legacy, by Cellar Door Games. It has been described as a "Metroidvania Rogue lite" game.
The setup is the usual 2D platform action RPG set in a haunted castle, but there is a novel twist: you have no hope of surmounting the odds in one go, but whatever loot you find is passed on to the next generation to try again, who will in turn charge onward fighting for whatever gains they can manage before passing the torch to the next generation of valiant-but-doomed explorers, hoping against hope to break the cursed chain of death in some remote future. The midi-style music sets the mood fairly well, paying homage to Super Nintendo-era classics and setting a tone that is at once lighthearted and gloom-and-doom in a way that is easily appreciated from an armchair.
The trailer video and the summary at gog.com linked above capture the heart of what this game is in an amazingly succinct and accurate way. I can only say that it is what it looks like, and what it looks like is a week's supply or more of crack for action gamers. I suggest trying it out, but be warned that after digging in, you may be tempted to purchase a PC gaming controller like I am.
In addition to the truth in advertising, this game is solidly balanced, and the evolution is pleasant to watch as your hapless sirs and ladies clumsily carve out hard-won foothold after foothold, crawling and then swelling in power, only to splat against the challenge around the next bend like so many flies on the great windshield. This game is ridiculously charming, scoring points with its fourth wall humor even where its small development team blatantly cuts corners, such as indicating female gender with a pink bow atop the knight's helmet a la Ms. Pac Man. Other references, such as to Paper Mario, are scattered about as well.
There are minor flaws in my opinion, and most likely they could be fixed with relatively minor patches. However, I won't go into details, as these detractors are so much more minor than many other areas of the game which have been painstakingly refined with love and respect for the player.
Rogue Legacy is an ideal case study for a rant I'd like to go on about a somewhat subtle - but very important - distinction where Rogue Legacy succeeds, and where any game with a heart of gold must succeed: the distinction between challenging the gamer and frustrating the gamer.
What does a challenging game like Rogue Legacy do? It makes the gamer say, "this game is hard", "Aaaaah! Nooo! I messed that up!", or "oh wow, that's going to make things difficult", or "huh, I'll really need to prepare more for this!" A frustrating game makes you say, "god, what the fuck am I even supposed to do if that happens?!?" or "come the fuck on! Why do you hate me?" or "ok, what's the exploit?" and eventually, either "I quit" or at best "I beat the level, but that was really stupid."
They are a lot more distinct than one may think. As an example, the hopeful heroes of Rogue Legacy are spawned with various random deformities, ranging from the mildly useful to the cosmetic, to the mixed blessings, and finally to the mild-to-moderately hindering - I give no examples, because they're fun to discover for yourself. The main point is that restraint is used on the part of Cellar Door Games so that each deformity introduces challenge rather than frustration and an instant loss.
As a veteran gamer, I have a learned reaction too loot drops called ephemeral loot paranoia. That is, if a pile of coins falls to the ground, I fully expect it evaporate in 5-10 seconds. as far back as the 80s, developers have been doing this to us, and if one were to ask why, the only real answer is, "because fuck you, that's why!" In a nutshell, that is the refrain of the frustrating game. It can come in a thousand forms or more, but Rogue Legacy is amazingly diligent about just saying no every time.
To give a positive example, observe the collision detection. Rogue Legacy is consistently just a tiny bit biased in favor of the player. The fireball that skims through a few pixels of your helmet passes by without harm, while your sword strikes seem to hit targets just a tiny bit farther out than you might expect. These little things add up: the base difficulty is high enough that the developers are secure enough in their game design so that they can tweak the hitboxes just an epsilon in your favor. That tiny epsilon is all that it takes for the player to pull off some daredevil moves - moves which other developers would have rewarded with death, because fuck you, that's why.
Rogue Legacy has such confidence in its respect for the player that it goes the extra mile, trolling the player from time to time secure in the knowledge that the player will take it in jest. No, you cannot reach that Fairy Chest, but maybe your daughter with Dwarfism will have better luck!
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