image credit: Polygon

There are differences.  Rogue Legacy takes itself much less seriously, to be sure.  Any time I pick up the controller I might see a silhouette of Santa Claus and his reindeer flying by in a haunted forest or find myself in control of a warrior with a bad case of forever farts.  But the first tell came the second I witnessed the heroes' ridiculously gallant stride: this one's being played for laughs.  All the better.


An odd air of foreboding lurks in spite of this madness.  It's a strange sensation mirrored in the soundtrack, which I swear is almost peppy behind all of the creepy guitar squeals.  Light chiptune elements gave me flashbacks to Harmony of Dissonance.  Death can come from any of the randomly-generated rooms, and it brings real consequences.  Billed as a "rogue-lite,"  Legacy intends finality for any character who fails within the castle walls.  Kind enough to allow the fallen one's offspring to empower themselves with any collected gold and eventually enter the re-arranged fortress themselves, but not kind enough to let the player keep their hands on any preferred hero.  If Sir Guy the Fifth is the best generated character of the game so far, too bad, he's dead!  Try again.

These offspring seeking to avenge a death in the family are more than names.  They're the games big selling point, really.  Each descendant will represent a different character class -- Knight, Mage, Shinobi... -- and be host to one or more genetic traits.  They might be nearly blind, fully colorblind, a dwarf small enough to take advantage of hidden passages, or so inept they can only shoot spells out of their butt.  Only a few of the possibilities.

The family tree ends up as a better marketing hook than game mechanic.  I like how each assault on the castle can feel fresh by the combinations of traits and character class I end up with, but too many are disadvantageous.  Dealing with vertigo and having the screen flipped upside-down is funny the first time, but does cause a genuinely sickening physical reaction and should never appear again.  Being faced with a choice between three debilitated siblings kills motivation.  Why put extra effort into a less enjoyable playthrough when I can re-roll a new batch of potential heroes by setting down the controller and letting baddies defeat the current one?  Wasting my time like that should not be the more appealing alternative, so I can only peg it as flawed design.

The smooth controls and attractive handdrawn-meets-pixels art style are the real draw for Rogue Legacy.  Heroes glide across the screen with ease, attacks have a meaty sense of impact, and optional upgrades allow double-jumping or even temporary flight.  Mobility is the ultimate joy of the game, the key that makes the level-upping and boss-hunting worthwhile. Pacing is quick all around, and my average lifespan for a single hero was between 10-15 minutes.  Maybe less.  I'm not very good!

image credit: gameskinny

Character building allows enough freedom to gain health or magic back with each kill, receive more gold, or reap benefits from facing more difficult enemies.  The benefits of that last one also happen to be gold, so maybe variety wouldn't have hurt.  Certain combinations can make a big difference during the five boss fights, however.

A minor story is at work, and journal entries strewn throughout the castle tell most of it.  I enjoyed these snippets of monologue more than expected since they host some of the most comical and haunting moments of the game.  Otherwise, it's an afterthought and ended sooner than I would have liked.  More intriguing exposition comes from rooms displaying a large portrait, each one dedicated to a different title Cellar Door Games have worked on in the past.  Breaking the fourth wall somehow feels totally natural for Rogue Legacy, so of course interacting with these portraits gives you snippets of insight about the designers' experience during creation of whichever game is shown.  Each is warm, down-to-earth, and uplifting.  Those short stories will stick with me at least as well as the rest of the game.

I might have enjoyed Rogue Legacy more without the dominating recurrence of random offspring, but this speaks to a strong core of the game.  I'd have explored the castle time and time again without gimmicks to guide me.  $15 is a small price to ask for a charming and addictive love letter to the action-platformer classics we don't see much of anymore.

                                                    image credit: giantbomb

Phil Fish, creator of indie hit Fez, has displayed a very public personal meltdown.  The link briefly describes an exchange between Fish and Gametrailers video host Marcus Beer shortly after Beer named Fish and other indie developers "fucking hipsters."  The Twitter-oriented interactions that followed climaxed with Fish writing "I'm done.  Fez 2 is canceled.  Goodbye."

There are any number of ways to look at this situation.  Professionally speaking, the public nature of this debacle makes it an embarrassment for Fish and Gametrailers alike.  This is not how paid experts are meant to interact and display themselves in front of loyal fanbases, and the grounds of game development and game journalism are worse for it.  

If that sounds judgmental, it probably is.  But I perceive it as a fact of the situation.  I won't speak for Beer's side, as the state of gaming journalism is a different web than I want to crawl into.  But for Fish, I can relate and empathize with his situation (albeit on a much smaller scale).  Fish claims to be harassed by internet trolls at an all-too-common frequency, which I have no problem believing, and Marcus Beer represents a large media outlet jumping on the personal attack rampage.  He's not the first of his kind to do so.

Indie development is constantly rising and presenting its own superstars.  But these aren't corporate-nurtured idols; rather, the likes of Phil Fish and Jonathan Blow and Edmund McMillen are totally ordinary individuals, to a fault.  The highs and lows of videogame enthusiasm are centered on their respective products, and the forces of fandom generally reserved for gigantic, faceless corporations are instead being hyper-magnified onto these unassuming newcomers.

Remember the nightmarish launch of Electonic Arts' Sim City on PC earlier this year?  Player and media backlash was immense, but because of the structure and presentation of a megacorp like EA most of us felt like our cries were simply being brushed off.  Who do you blame for that?  The programming team?  QA?  The CEO and his top management?  The backlash becomes a shotgun blast over the distance, spread out, weakened.  Now, imagine if all of that blowback surrounded a game developed by one or two people.  We know both their names, both their Twitters, both of their home addresses.  Respect that distinction, and the situation of indie developers like Fish becomes wholly intimidating, almost terrifying.

Forunately, nothing of such a monumental scale has yet afflicted an indie developer.  Yet the inherently more personal nature of their interactions with fans creates problems of a relatively large scale.  How can these indies be expected to properly maneuver attacks that become more invasive as fans learn more personal information?  Some indies, by forces of will I can't begin to understand, handle the attention in stride.  Fish and others have displayed hostile reactions I cannot advocate, but also can't condemn for being human and vulnerable against forces louder and bigger than themselves.

At a younger age, I was faced with online hostility from probably no more than twelve members of an internet forum.  Forum posts, AIM messages, the like.  All of it was only text on a wall, and at any time I could have simply signed off and gone about my time with other matters.  I didn't, somehow couldn't bring myself to, and I found the experience crushing.  That's from twelve people.

I am hesitant to speak of Fish's appearance in Indie Game: The Movie, which documented some of the trials he and other developers faced in pushing their games out into the world.  Fish has expressed displeasure with his representation in the film and the way viewers have approached him after the fact behaving, he perceives, as though they now understood him on a personal level.  I won't say I understand him, but the weight of game development on its own, before fan positivity or negativity had a value in it, has a visible impact on Fish during the filming.  If nothing else, it is plain to see that game creation is a very stressful and perfectionist endeavor for Fish, and I wonder what can be fairly expected of a developer when he must also triumph over those who would put him down for it.

The personal attacks and overblown reactions we witnessed between Fish and Beer are indeed lessening the value and dignity of an already troubled videogame industry.  The faces of videogame development's future have to be better.  But I'm at a loss as to how that gets accomplished without making indies as cold and distant as the corporate developers they mean to counter.