Editor’s note: Hello! Over the next few days, we’re running an “Escape Game” series, and we’re finally starting to look back at games that release sometime in 2021, but for various reasons we couldn’t fully cover them at the time.
In Loop Hero, you don’t walk in a loop, you walk in a loop. Each procedurally created path goes back to its own starting point, but with some kinks and bends in the shape. It reminds me of some natural art made of discarded rubber bands left by delivery guys on tour. I just realized that it is often the rounds of the loop, not the loops.
Loop Hero is really simple, but it can be laborious to explain. let’s start. This is an RPG with all the monsters, loot, quests and bosses you could expect. There’s even a story — a pretty good one, about a world that’s ended but can still be saved, brought back to life again and again. It has heroes and classes and all those things, but its logo, what makes it unique is that it doesn’t allow you to directly control the hero. Not really. You can’t fight their battle or choose their next target. Instead, you have them outfitted with the best stuff, and then start and stop them as they walk around in circles, little pixel people in a tiny pixel world, straight from the Commodore 64 charm.
The world is a loop here, the rubber band the postman left on the floor. It’s not a big deal at first, it’s just that your hero hits some low-level enemies while taking a detour. Enemies drop loot that you can pick from to improve your hero’s stats, and they drop cards that are more interesting.
Cards allow you to piece together some worlds. Take the circular world for example. You can place swamps or graveyards on it. You can push the vampire castle towards it, or light it up with a beacon. These are just early cards. All of these things will spawn new monsters in the loop for you to attack, or change the way things work on tiles. A good card might make you attack faster! A bad card could create a weird time-traveling horror where he’ll show up to make things difficult. But is this really a bad card, or is there something remarkable about it, waiting to be understood?
Outside of loops, you can also place cards. You can pull the world back into existence one at a time, one rock, one mountain, one piece of grass, or one tree at a time. This thing also has a purpose. Certain features of the landscape may increase your HP. Others may regenerate HP. All of these will provide you with resources – we’ll get to that later if I remember to mention it again. There is a problem with placement. Which function likes to be adjacent to which other function? What bonuses can you find in the arrangement? What is the best layout? How to make meadows bloom and rocks into proper mountains?
Don’t forget to loop while all these things are going on. What you put away from the loop also affects it. Mountains are great for HP, but they cause new enemies to spawn on the loop, just like villages and fields on the loop are great for HP, but attract their own fears. As the cards grow and your choices become more complex, you’re really programming: you’re programming the horrors your heroes have to face. You want them to face these horrors, because defeating the horrors will give you better loot and better cards. You are stronger and have more resources.
Those resources! Each time you reach the start of the loop again, you can choose to leave with all the resources you’ve collected. These are tied to a base-building game that permanently unlocks new things for your heroes, including new cards and new classes to try, three in total, each twisting the game in odd ways. However, if you leave the loop to cash out, when you return, you have to start from scratch, except of course on the basis of incremental improvements. That means junk gear. low-level enemies. There is nothing in the world. Loop, loop, loop until things start to taste delicious again.
The reason you do all this is that eventually, when you’ve placed enough cards and put enough worlds back together, a boss will appear. If your stats are good enough, you can automatically pass them and go to the next game, then the next boss, then the next. The risk is as important as the reward, though: die on the boss – die on anything – and you lose most of the resources you collect while looping. And, you know, you have to start over with junk gear and low-level enemies. What a procrastination.
This is where Loop Hero unfolds with additional complexity. You earn allowances. There are tasks. You delve into the stats and how each class works, and discover a game full of tedious richness just waiting to be teased into the light of understanding. However, all of these are guided through loops. This is where everything makes sense—where feet meet road, sword meets slime, where your heroes meet the world you built for them.
There’s more, but I’ll stop explaining. This is a strange problem with Loop Hero – although the “problem” may be driving it. Whenever I try to introduce the game to someone, it always morphs into telling them how it works. You have to get to grips with mechanics very quickly, because mechanics—the way foreground or background elements are all familiar to us in RPGs—is where it really lives. It’s a game about games, a commentary on OCD, and it’s an adventure in itself. I meant “as much” – still a wonderful adventure for anyone who likes rising numbers. But yeah, kind of like a secondary text industry. This is a dissertation about games and players, and a real game.
What do I think? I suspect that I’m as forced, drawn, and frustrated by the dirty parts as anyone. I love the fact that it reminds me very strongly of Monopoly – you’ve run a few laps on a track full of ever-changing possibilities for glory and disaster, and a lot of it is your fault – I love that it ends up being A fact about the game on both ends of the pencil – sharp grit dots and erasers, creation and destruction, and how they affect each other in interesting ways. That’s the theme, the mechanical thrust, and, I suspect, the direction of a lot of design impulses to tie it all together. But I know what.
Actually, I think Julian Barnes said it best, although as far as I can tell, he’s not talking about Loop Hero at all. (He’s talking about going into a dungeon, lol.) In the introduction to his art book, Eyes Wide Open, he says, “In all art, two things usually happen at the same time: the desire to create something new, And an ongoing dialogue with the past.” That’s a very cyclical hero, isn’t it? Pixel art with the help of a laser-engraved RPG build kit that just arrived the day after.A game that knows this well, and its designers will capture your obsession as if they were idling their hands into the piano case and plucking the strings – but it’ll still have you fighting slimes, Because fighting slimes is outstanding.