Rogue Legacy

Rogue Legacy is a 2D platformer in which your characters and the levels you explore are procedurally generated every run. Death is permanent, but all your characters are connected genetically like one big unlucky family. It came out in June 2013 and it was quite good, even before the update it received the following December which added a bunch of bosses and room types. 

Today, over four years since that last update, developer Cellar Door Games rolled out another update for Rogue Legacy to celebrate its five-year anniversary. It seems the devs had more free time after shipping the delightful beat-'em-up Full Metal Furies this March. 

A big part of Rogue Legacy is choosing new characters from a range of possible heirs with different traits, which can be anything from baldness to alektorophobia (the fear of chickens). The five-year update adds two new traits. The first is prosopagnosia (the inability to remember familiar faces), which, according to Rogue Legacy's wiki, prevents you from seeing anything about your heirs when choosing a new one. The other is clonus (a type of muscle spasm), which, if you're playing with a controller, causes it to vibrate every few seconds. 

I always preferred playing Rogue Legacy with a controller, but that may change since the new update also adds mouse rebinding. "2207 comments later and we finally got the message," Cellar Door said. "I hope you degenerates are grateful!" There are some other technical improvements in the patch too, like cloud saving and upgrades to the Mac and Linux versions. 

'Donation boxes' have also been added. These are used to upgrade the unique characters you use when fighting 'remix' bosses, which are optional, amped-up versions of the regular bosses. By dumping a bunch of gold into a donation box, you can "power up your heroes from the past and give yourself that extra edge." 

Finally, Rogue Legacy veterans got a new achievement to chase: Thanatophobia, unlocked by completing the game in 15 lives or less. Players who previously had 100 percent achievement completion can instantly unlock Thanatophobia by holding Left Alt, Caps Lock and then T from the title screen. 

You can read the full patch notes here.  

Spelunky

In celebration of the release of Crypt of the Necrodancer, maybe, Valve has collected some of Steam's best roguelikes and lopped off much of the cost. The Steam Roguelike Sale runs over the weekend, and discounts roguelikelike heavy hitters like FTL, Rogue Legacy, Risk of Rain and Spelunky, and even a couple of fits-the-rigid-definition-of-a-roguelike, also known as 'proper' roguelikes, too.

My picks of the bunch would be Delver for 50% off, a first-person dungeon crawl with great music; the maybe-too-grindy-but-still-good Rogue Legacy for 75% off; the deeper-than-Moria NEO Scavenger for 33% less; Spelunky for chump change; and the fab One Way Heroics for a ridiculous 77p. You can also grab Binding of Isaac: Rebirth for 33% off, FTL for just under 2, and, well, browse the list yourself, there's a load of great stuff here.

The Steam Roguelike Sale ends Monday 27th April at 10am PST, which my brain always tells me stands for 'PlaneScape Torment'.

...

Search news
Archive
2024
Apr   Mar   Feb   Jan  
Archives By Year
2024   2023   2022   2021   2020  
2019   2018   2017   2016   2015  
2014   2013   2012   2011   2010  
2009   2008   2007   2006   2005  
2004   2003   2002