It's refreshing as hell to play a game that doesn't even hint at how to unlock some of its powerful effects. These surprises are arbitrary, telegraphed, and delightful. And if you play a tenth mountain or rock card, a goblin encampment will randomly spawn on the road, churning out some nasty, fast-attacking enemies. But, surprise: harpies now live in the mountain you built, a challenging enemy type that will fly down to a random part of your board every few days. When you drop nine mountain cards in a 3x3 grid, they transform into a massive Everest peak, granting a mega boost to max HP. My favorite design element are the hidden effects that trigger when you play certain cards.
Make it too easy, and you'll probably fail to kill the boss or earn enough resources to make the trip worthwhile: wood, food, and mysterious orbs you need to build and upgrade new structures back at camp, the persistent layer of Loop Hero. Make it too hard, and you'll get pummeled. Loop Hero becomes a game about tending a vicious circle, a gauntlet that perpetually regrows deadly shit that scales up in level each time you complete a loop.
Each run becomes a small experiment: what if I drop a bunch of spider cocoons and sand dunes, which lower all creatures' HP? What will river cards do if I intersect them with the road itself? Can my Warrior survive two adjacent tiles filled with giant sandworms? You do not decide where to move or what to attack you can only build the level itself and hope that the machine you're piecing together is good enough to give you enough XP, resources, and gear to make you strong but not kill you outright. What Loop Hero adds to the "fight, die, repeat" formula of roguelikes is this indirect action. These environment pieces in turn alter hero or enemy stats like attack speed and HP, and spawn corresponding enemies that you fight automatically as you pass through them: ghosts, ratwolves, bandits, packs of spiders. As your little hero auto-walks around this stone path, you populate the rest of the world yourself by playing cards like graveyards, battlefields, villages, meadows, or mountains one by one. You send one of three hero classes (Warrior, Rogue, Necromancer) on repeated expeditions to an empty road sitting in an otherwise blank void. Loop Hero presents a novel and dead-simple gameplay format that's strangely engrossing, considering much of your time playing it is hands-off. This isn't nostalgia for nostalgia's sake. From the moment the 16-color title screen fades in alongside dramatic chiptunes, you feel like you're playing some forgotten, VGA-era fantasy RPG, a game that still contains some of the mystery and difficulty of 1991, but gently modernized to 2021. Loop Hero is the rehydrated essence of a dozen misremembered, ancient games. This charming "micro RPG" is one of 2021's early gems.