Loop Hero

Joel Haddock Mar 14, 2024

You have to hand it to Loop Hero - it does exactly what it says on the tin.

The premise of Loop Hero is simple - the world, for reasons unknown, has been erased save for a few baffled survivors lost in the void.

Fortunately for them, as the titular hero, the player has the power to slowly rebuild pieces of the world from fragments of memory.

The bulk of the action takes place on the loop - a barren road the hero is compelled to walk over and over. At first it's just you, the road, and some slimes. But with each victory, the player gains cards that allow them to place terrain back onto the empty map. Almost every kind of map tile provides some sort of benefit, as well as generally having some sort of downside.

A grove, for instance, allows the hero to collect bits of wood when they pass through. However, they also spawn viscious ratwolves every few days which are much more dangerous than the boring slimes. Graveyards as well provide crucial resources, but also spew forth skeletons you might have to kill twice.

Battles are fully automated - the player just sits back and watches as the hero hacks away at their foes. Winning battles not only provides new map tiles, but new equipment. Carefully managing what the hero is equipped with gives the player a variety of ways to tweak their particuarly build. Maybe they want a tanky warrior with a juiced-up regeneration rate. Or maybe they'd prefer to make them super evasive and never get hit at all.

A new loop begins

When the hero falls (which they will do a lot), they return to their camp with whatever spoils they've managed to collect. With those resources the player can start to rebuild a village, building by building. Most new buildings provide an immediate benefit in terms of stats or abilities, and many also unlock additional terrain cards to provide more valuable, unique resources.

One of the most delightful parts of Loop Hero is discovering all of the secret interactions between terrain types. A set of rock tiles arranged in just the right way might suddenly turn into a much larger mountain, for instance. The game does nothing to hint they might exist, but in the natural course of laying tiles a player will inevitably stumble onto one by accident. Once they do, they realize there must be more and the hunt is on to try new and interesting combinations just to see what happens.

Home sweet void

In its early stages, Loop Hero is a constant journey of discovery, seeing how the player can fiddle with the world to produce unexpected results. As they advance, it turns into a constant balancing act of risk vs reward as they try to see how they can push their runs to get the resources they need to unlock even more discoveries. Then, ultimately, it becomes a test of figuring out how to put all these pieces to work to push through to the ultimate conclusion of this strange world's fate.

That's why Loop Hero is the best roguelite.