Rogue Legacy forces you to make tradeoffs at nearly every turn. You can lock down a castle's design in order to keep the layout stable from one attempt to the next, but in doing so you forfeit 40% of your earnings - and on top of that, all the chests you've opened remain plundered in future generations. In practice, it's not so easy you build skills by unlocking them with the cash you earn from each foray into the ever-changing castle, and you can't accumulate cash from generation to generation (at least not without making a hefty investment first). In theory, you can blunder through the game haplessly over and over again until you win through sheer blunt force from all the level-ups you've purchased. And, as in Spelunky, certain factors external to the protagonist carry on beyond death: The bosses you've defeated, the levels you've unlocked for your family manor, the equipment you've purchased.ĭid you know the earliest demo build of Rogue Legacy used Castlevania placeholder sprites? Oh. You control a fragile hero who loses every shred of hard-earned progress upon death, leaving the game's crusade to be taken up by that warrior's descendants. It's a close relative of Spelunky, a game that could best be described as ' delightful.' On paper, in fact, Rogue Legacy reads like the swords-and-sorcery version of Spelunky. The music rocks, it has RPG-like progression mechanics, and best of all it now runs on PlayStation Vita, where it looks phenomenal.Īnd yet, something about Rogue Legacy just doesn't quite gel for me. It makes use of a visual style that makes it look like some TurboGrafx-16 game that time forgot.

The game checks all the right boxes for me: It combines non-linear Castlevania-style platforming with procedurally generated stage layouts. I feel like I should enjoy Rogue Legacy a lot more than I do.

Rogue legacy sprite