To describe Loop Hero, it would almost be easier to tell you the descriptors that aren’t relevant. Part deck builder, part real-time strategy, part survival horror, this roguelike from Four Quarters Games is new and deeply addicting.
After a recent Steam demo piqued my interest, I was thrilled to go back and see if the full game could deliver those strong initial impressions. What I got was something that is even better and continues to find ways to keep me alert.
Beneath the game’s colorful ’80s fantasy aesthetic lies an engine whose constant motion is a disconcerting touch to start, forcing you to make moves on the fly as your hero takes down waves of monsters. But in those fleeting moments when you manage to make everything work in your favor, this is a game that is absolutely worth it.
Loop Hero Review-in-Progress: Groundhog’s Roguelike
As the name suggests, Loop Hero involves a certain amount of repetition. A catastrophic event has occurred and the main protagonist must try to rebuild things using the resources gathered from expeditions to the rest of the world. These expeditions involve laps on a randomly generated circuit full of slime. Defeating the slimes gives you the cards to build the circuit with a scenario that generates resources such as wood and food, as well as spawn points for other ghoulish monsters.
Killing enemies gives your intrepid adventurer new gear, as well as more cards, and you keep going until the boss is killed, you die, or you retreat. Each successful spin, bounded by campfire, levels surrounding creatures, and a recurring daily cycle determines the creature spawn rate and other bonuses.
In the beginning Loop Hero is a lot to understand. Unless you stop, your character always moves straight and enemies constantly wander. Battles happen automatically, and while you can switch gear at any time, if you get into one that you’re badly defeated, you’re pretty much out of luck. It’s a gauntlet reminiscent of the Ultima and Might and Magic series, through Hades and The Binding of Isaac, but what’s amazing is how well it teaches you to navigate this desolate world.
Most of the cards have basic descriptions for things like “Lawn”, which gives you 2 HP at the start of each day, or “Vampire Mansion”, which adds a leech to any fight on an adjacent tile. The spaces where you can put a certain card are highlighted in green and most can be played without specific criteria. As you play, the map fills with tiny, solid-color animations for each entity in motion, your literal white knight marching towards the ominously heavy 8-bit soundtrack.
It’s about constantly making moves and seeing what happens. When you switch gear, the previously equipped piece evaporates, and if you get more gear than the nine weapon and armor slots allow, the overflow becomes resources in your backpack.
Many of the cards have some form of stacking effect if you place them close together, such as nine mountains or rocks that become a mountain range for a bonus. But beware, you now have harpies flying around, and another mountain or rock and a goblin camp will form somewhere on the trail.
Half the fun, and most of the challenge, is placing something and realizing you made a mistake, and now a blood golem is on the way. Sharply, unlike Sunset Games’ Into The Breach, another strategic RPG, I’ve never encountered anything in Loop Hero that stopped me from just making one bad play. It was always a build-up, accidentally creating a choke point full of skeletons and spiders or not thinking about how quickly goblins regenerated.
You’re always cycling through different ways of thinking, from smart terrain positioning and making sure your champion’s health bar stays up to keep relying on generated resources. The different classes each require different strategies, where health regeneration serves the warrior well, but the rogue is more suited to evasion and so on. It is important to remain cautious, but focusing on one is a recipe for disaster.
If you hold out long enough, one of the numerous Lich entities that helped this world reset will appear as a boss. Difficulty peaks are regular and most important in these battles, where paying attention to boss bonuses is crucial. You will lose more times than you win, and sometimes it will be a close encounter.
Beating them opens up the next stage and grants some knowledge that helps analyze what’s going on and if it can be fixed. Losing sends you back to the campsite, with 30% of what you collected in tow – a manual retreat allows you to keep 60% and defeating the boss earns you everything. There is no way to recover your body, like in Dark Souls or Hollow Knight, much to my absolute relief.
Gradually build the camp using the materials you’ve collected, unlocking upgrades to your gear, news cards, and more. Each new square in place brings another NPC and some more information about what reality was like before whatever happened. Everyone and everything has been trapped in this endless vortex, where time doesn’t matter, and a collective amnesia forces us all to take back the old world and how things were.
This isn’t limited to people in your field either. New enemies will often spark dialogue, mentioning the opposing roles, remembering that sooner or later it was all part of an ecosystem. Loop Hero doesn’t necessarily do something profound with this meta candor, but its inclusion made me pause.
It doesn’t take long to recognize how Four Quarters Games has captured the current moment. Living in a strange stasis between an old world that is gone and a new one that will need some work, fighting forces that are hard to understand.
Loop Hero is the morbid sequel to Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask that we never got, where the moon crashed, and that’s what happened. Like Majora’s Mask, Loop Hero is structured around time warp but it’s not a story about time travel.
Rather than taking the Avengers: Endgame approach of making you fight through the ages to stop the big bad, Loop Hero is about existing in the post-apocalypse and using the tools readily at your disposal to fix things – or at least make them better.
It is an important distinction, amidst what are now months of blockage, because bending the laws of physics is not a solution available to us. The allegory of the rupture of time and space does not give me much comfort, but I am reminded that taking each day as it comes and that doing what I can where I can is enough, it does. We’ll be able to beat this one day, and Loop Hero is a very welcome reminder of that.
