The average dungeon is a fairly stable place, ignoring the monsters. It’s been slowly aging away for centuries or even millennia and the caverns and hallways are pretty well settled by now. Loot River’s dungeons, on the other hand, were built on water, with the progress only possible by linking rafts together every which way. The overall dungeon outline may be set in (literal) stone but the passageway through? That’s a very different thing, because each raft is it’s own tetronimo-styled piece of the pathway. While the pieces can’t rotate they do slide in one of the four standard directions, and the trick is to use this not just to create a path through the maze but also arrange it for the best approach towards the monsters waiting to snack on a careless adventurer.
Loot River is an action-roguelike with a unique setting, featuring a bit of light puzzling in the dungeons to go with its Dark Souls-styled deliberate combat. An adventurer in a plague doctor mask is exploring the old ruins when he’s defeated but doesn’t actually die, ending up in a strange little village with only a couple of people to explain what’s going on. While functionally immortal he can be taken out, and in standard roguelike fashion ends up back in the village with any weapons found in the latest dungeon run but all levels and accessories stripped away. He can carry two weapons at once, with their abilities scaling in power based on stats, and combat is best thought of as careful button-mashing. It takes proper timing to chain standard strikes into a combo and the life-saving dash move has a cooldown, but once you get a sense of a weapon’s rhythm and how the monsters attack combat can be quick and powerful. It also helps that moving a raft and charging the heavy strike can happen independently of each other, so a valid strategy is to charge up with the raft out of range of the enemy then slide it into place while releasing the strike. There are other little tricks to discover as well, such as the way the dash move can let you travel a diagonal line between two raft corners rather than needing them to share a side, and today’s demo gives a nice hint of what else might be hiding in there.
TheLoot River demois on Steam as of today and, while it only includes the first two areas, is a great taste of what the full game will have to offer. Combat, puzzles, and a unique dungeon traversal mechanic all combine into a game where each piece depends on the others to work at its best. The full game may be off in some undefined period of 2022 but the demo is now, and it’s definitely worth a nice evening’s gaming.
