Don't let yourself be put off.
Even if this video game experience at first glance seems like a bland metaphor for life on the wheel of our modern working world, clad in pixel fashion of the eighties: a little man walks along a circular path in the wasteland, the end of which always reunites with the beginning in absolute nothing.
On the way, the warrior always encounters the same slime blobs that carry the things of a world that has been eaten by oblivion and release them when they succumb to the sword.
Every loop has the same creepy characters, the same predetermined route, the same futile efforts - only to start all over again the next day?
Axel Weidemann
Editor in the features section.
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Anyone who thinks that this sounds familiar will find ways and means of defending themselves against the mildew hell of eternal return in and through the video game "Loop Hero".
It begins with the lighting of the campfire, the first light in this darkness that has suddenly fallen over the world - a place where the hero can lick his wounds, recharge his batteries, read a book or play a video game and where other survivors of this cataclysm can be found gather.
Lesson one in difficult times, Roy Black already knew that: You are not alone!
Since our hero marches and fights by himself, the player does not have a controlling but a supporting function. He can at best let the action pause and acts as a kind of squire. He hands the hero captured weapons and artifacts that increase his skills, but also manages the terrain maps that are played into his hand with each new round. In addition to expanding the camp, this is the most exciting function of the video game, the entire mechanics and history of which are only gradually revealed and the hero's journey has a certain element of luck, as occurs in classic card games. That means, not everything is luck, because playing the cards, where you fill the world around the wasteland ring tile by tile with life, requires a little planning. Lesson two: don't be greedy!An example: We get the “Forest” card in hand. If it is placed, the warrior attacks one percent faster. With every tenth forest map, however, a forest settlement emerges, a grown copy of a village through which the living forest tries to understand how civilization works. The settlement brings powerful wood warriors with it.
Each card has its own peculiarity: rocks give life energy, but summon goblins or, worse, harpies. Desert fields reduce the life force of the opponent, but every seventh field brings a ziggurat, in which a desert spirit is conjured up that takes the side of the opponent. It is important to pave the path with monster dwellings - cemeteries, vampire estates, spider cocoons or groves of blood - as their fallen inhabitants leave the hero with equipment as well as resources with which the camp can be expanded: watchtowers, a forge, an alchemist's hut or woodcutters bring him Hero bonuses that last even if he has to start all over again after his temporary demise.
If nothing is filled with something to a certain extent, the hero has to face an end boss per chapter. From them we learn what could have happened before something became nothing. The first, the “Lich”, an overpowering, undead magician who goes by the name “Omicron” of all things, wonders: “I have consumed all of your reality, every element of it now rests in a pocket dimension.” They should stay there , "Until entropy does its work and transforms everything into a uniform static mass". A lazarus “priestess” brings a little more insight in the second chapter, in which only a wasteland path is waiting for us (with stronger opponents): It is now God's will to unwind and take back his universe. She asks: "How can you still offer resistance?" Our hero,who lacks faith here and is not very quick-witted doesn't know, but has a guess: “That's just how we humans are knitted!” Lesson three: Never give up. So to a new one.
Loop Hero
is available for Nintendo Switch, Mac OS and Windows PCs and costs 15 euros.