So let’s move onto the other game I played, which not only falls under the same category of “Retro style game taking place primarily in black void” but by extraordinary coincidence, is also an anagram of Loop Hero if you change some of the letters and don’t know what an anagram is: Everhood. So that’s Loop Hero, it’s like taking a somewhat interesting book and systematically removing all the pages with a very slow angle grinder. Like, for a lot of it I can stick a podcast on and doze off, which is fine, some games be like that and sometimes it’s nice just to fidget with something while I daydream about primary school teachers on waterslides, but then suddenly you get a few unlucky rolls and find yourself with two health and your kneecaps hanging off and if you’re not awake and quick on the pause button your dude just breezes straight on into fuckedland. At the same time, I don’t really like how Loop Hero ricochets from involving to uninvolving. But some of the gravel is M&Ms so it’s somewhat rewarding.
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A very slow waterslide full of gravel instead of water. There is something very absorbing about Loop Hero that gives me the same “Ooh just one more go around” feeling that a waterslide offers. If it were a deck builder it’d be a very inefficient one that would require infinite cards. Oh I forgot to mention Loop Hero’s also not a deck building game on top of not being a roguelike or an idle game.
See, you use the loot to build upgrades for your home base to add more variety to your encounter deck. If you get too cocky you end up going home with the $200 box to an awkward conversation with the missus as it were. When you get back around to the start of the loop you have to decide if you’re going to go around again to keep collecting better and better loot but risk dying and losing most of it, or head back to camp and bank all the loot you’ve got now, which will mean having to start from scratch.Įssentially it’s a fantasy 16-bit version of Deal or No Deal. Again, like with thinking about primary school teachers during sex. But lest the phrase “idle game” rise unbidden into your thoughts like the image of a stern primary school teacher during sex, there is some challenge here, and the challenge is simply deciding when to stop. You don’t even get to choose when to drink potions.
The hero and the monsters just automatically take turns smacking each other like a roomful of sexually inexperienced people trying to figure out what the big deal is with S&M and all you can do is change your equipment. I say “fight,” you aren’t involved in that, either. The actual gameplay of Loop Hero consists of the lone wanderer walking around the loop fighting randomly spawned apple flavour jelly tots to receive terrain cards that you then place on and around the loop to liven up the scenery and provide more different things to fight and more opportunities to collect loot. Although I guess your memory isn’t the best because you can only remember it in a rather muddy 16-bit art style with slightly hard to read text reminiscent of one of those depressing Amiga games from the 90s designed by sad British people who live in places like Hull. All that remains is a single looping path, and all you can do is follow it and bit by bit remember the world as it used to be. Everything has been reduced to a void, it’s like watching network television at ten in the morning. The premise is, you are a lone hero in a world that has been destroyed. Or rather, watching someone else march around and around in a circle while we occasionally fling them a new pair of trousers and dream silly silly dreams about what it would be like to be the one playing the video game. And what an appropriate month this is for our first game, Loop Hero, a game about March-ing. Well, it’s March, so let’s March on down to Indie Game Square, crowded as ever with the permanent farmer’s market of Steam, where the barks of stallholders mingle with the squeals of poorly drawn anime girls getting violated and no one has glimpsed the sun since 2014.
We have a merch store as well! Visit the store for brand new ZP merch. Want to watch Zero Punctuation ad-free? Sign-up for The Escapist + today and support your favorite content creators! This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Loop Hero and Everhood.
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