Gary Chang lives in a small 344-square-foot apartment in Hong Kong. Gary Chang is an architectural designer, so he took a space that would almost fit in a single room and made it into every room in the house as needed. bedroom? Pull out of bed. kitchen? Pull back a wall to reveal a scope and a sink. bath? Pull the other wall aside. Laundry and utilities? La – you understand me.
I watched a wonderful documentary in Zhang’s apartment last night. At the end I thought: cor, maybe we’re all thinking this home has something wrong? Perhaps Zhang’s etching sketch lifestyle is the way to do it. Focus on what you like and imagine ideas around that and that separate room. Choose a house that slides into place only when you want it to be there.
Harmony – a dubious harmony really – and I played Loot River today. Loot River is a creative and deeply satisfying Roguelite, a top-down game with an element of soul. There are many of these. But Loot River has a great idea, one that Chang might subscribe to. The game takes place in a dungeon made of floating tiles – tetrominos put you in the right headspace, but there are more shapes – when you move with the left stick, you can move the tile you are on with the right, swipe it Cross the water from one place to another.
It’s all about hacking and slashing (soul-like combat locked with parries and thumps and button locks), finding treasure and leveling up and getting better weapons and armor, then dying and losing everything and starting over. It’s fantastic.
As it turns out, being able to move the floor brings a lot to the game about hacking and slashing. When you can move the part of your surroundings where you’re currently standing, you’re very attentive to other things around you – which fits perfectly with the high level of vigilance a rogue needs.
This is the type that usually decides when to engage and when not to. So while there are a lot of clever moving puzzles about tiles, most of the time I play I’m moving tiles and Think about fighting.
It’s like a Roguelike where you ride the Routemaster, really. Let’s say I’m safe on my tile and there’s another tile nearby with eight bad guys on it. Maybe I rush up, let some bad guys keep going, then sprint again, separate myself from the main crowd and do them. Maybe I connect and reconnect and disconnect tiles like circuits, keep things flowing, and turn things into a sort of factory-destroying plan where I chew on enemies at a pace that suits me.
Route Master! circuit! So many competing analogies, but I guess it’s no surprise, in a game that manages to ditch the familiar – roguelikes! Four grids! – Together in a fresh way.
Highlight an array of enemies in gritty Shepherd’s pixel art. Lobbyist! Runners and eaters! All swordsmen! Poison bomb! Terrible bosses! I think they’d be fun in any game, but in a game where you can zip up on a handy floor and sprint again, you’ve got really crazy options. When to participate? How to get close? From which angle do you approach first?
Add in magic and different weapons and artefacts that allow you to modify the game in a certain way and you’ll have something special. By the way, magic and weapons provide the progression system, and in this particular roguelite, it’s the easiest. Level-ups, getting cash, stat-boosting loot, and maybe some killer stuff like a feather (I love this) that allows you to appear on the other side of the enemy after the first strike. dead, everything is over. You can’t take anything with you.
What you can take with you – sort of – is any weapon or spell you unlock by earning a currency called Knowledge, then head back to the main hub between levels to cash out in the store. But even that’s not that simple, as you use knowledge to unlock weapons and spells, but the game scrambles them into your hands at the start of a new run without you having choice or influence. You pay for Knowledge to make the pool of potential approaches wider, but nothing more. And, of course, when you die, you lose any knowledge you didn’t cash in. It’s maddening.
Everyone says it’s great, I think: brutally mean but clever and characteristic. I love the fact that I spend a lot of time rafting the river standing on my little safety quad wondering if I should take it to the next piece of land I can see where there are eight horrors waiting for me. I love this simple twist, like enemies locking tiles together until they’re dispatched, or fire traps that spread, or tiles of different heights that require stairs to get in, to make everything feel new again.
I like the accessibility options across the screen, including font size, platform guides, and enemy outlines, as well as screen shaking, colorblind mode, tweaks to vibration and UI, and a simple mode that reduces enemy health. I love a mystical world built around a hub full of statues of body parts and grass strewn with bones. I love the shininess of the water on which the game tiles slide: lazy ripples, light shattering into fuzzy dots, laps and splashes of the poor tide. I love funeral drones with music.
You know that moment in a good rogue, you overextend yourself, but you also gain wealth you don’t want to lose before you can put it in the bank? That’s the ultimate purpose of Loot River: I travel around the world, rushing from block to block, breaking off from a small continent, an archipelago of burning wood, and searching, looking for the exit of the level, I watch me health gauge for little fear. A procedural dungeon crawler where you can scramble a level you once scrambled? Gary Zhang would be proud.