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S2 Ep149: Loop Hero
79 Plays5 years ago
MINOR SPOILERS: Loop Hero
Join Dave and Jake as they take a loop at a hot indie steam title that's released recently!
Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
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Join Dave and Jake as they take a loop at a hot indie steam title that's released recently!
Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
Recommended
Transcript
Life's Roller Coaster and Digital Mail
00:00:52
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I'm joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave? It's going okay. It's going okay. That's good. Riding the ups and downs of life like a child's roller coaster, because I don't want to get too nauseous.
00:01:16
Speaker
But I like a little bit of the excitement, like not checking my mail for a day. Hoo hoo. Taking the risks.
00:01:26
Speaker
Somebody might steal my important billing information. I guess like as getting the mail becomes less interesting, the more likely it is to contain bills or like collections notices or something like that. It's typically bills. Um, so get that fucking coupon magazine that weighs about a pound that like everybody gets and it's all just done with them.
00:01:55
Speaker
I guess just standard newspaper, but it consistently will pad out my trash can because I don't, I don't coupon. I'm not going to spend the time to look for savings on a one food item that I may or may not want in the future for a limited time. No. Yeah. I'm not pen pals with anybody who sends me mail. Unfortunately, it's all, it's all spam garbage.
00:02:20
Speaker
They're not writing back. Well, it is fun if you order something to get the mail. That's fair. It doesn't really show up in the mail though. No, not like it's usually a package. Or Amazon directly.
00:02:36
Speaker
What I still love is when I get packages and it's like, oh, it's important that I'm tracking and it's like worth more than $10. And then I just go outside to check the normal mail and they're like, oh, there's a fucking giant package there. We didn't ring the doorbell because why would we do that? And we didn't notify you until the day after via email. So hope you were home asshole.
00:03:02
Speaker
Yeah, I've definitely had, I've had the case of things being delivered, uh, that were quite expensive, um, and no notification given whatsoever. This is, this is one of the primary incentives. I think they actually have like a home, but also a home away from other people. It's just more security delivery. That's probably for me. Um, the trade-off being possibly worse internet. So that's, that's, that's what you gotta deal with.
00:03:33
Speaker
Yeah. I also like knowing people are around. Like I like knowing that I'm in a community. I don't need to know the people in the community or like them. Like I don't know any of my neighbors. I'm not close with them, but it's like, if you're going by on a walk, you're like, give them a head nod or something. Right. Um, but being out in the middle of nowhere,
00:03:59
Speaker
Like a girl who I used to date lived up in like Northeastern PA and their
Community Living vs. Remote Areas
00:04:04
Speaker
house was on a road with no other houses. And that to me is just a little bit too far remote, too far removed.
00:04:11
Speaker
No, I get that. You kind of have to like you have to work the average a little bit because it's like if you have too many neighbors, then you might get killed by like a neighbor. If you have no neighbors, you could get killed by anybody and no one would know. So it's like. And I want and I want somebody to know. Right. Yeah. It's like as long as they can solve the crime, that's ultimately what we're going for. Yeah. If you if you were stabbed, would you try to leave a clue in your own blood?
Blue's Clues Humor and Dark Themes
00:04:41
Speaker
Yeah, that's the first thing I would do. Yeah. I'm like, remember episodes of Blue's Clues? Don't call anybody. I would update my Discord statuses to like, die laughing LMFAO.
00:04:57
Speaker
I'm on season two of Blue's Clues, so I haven't gotten to the Clue in Blood episode yet, so looking forward to that. It's a really dark turn, but I feel like it developed Blue more so as a character. He gets to get more into his backstory.
00:05:13
Speaker
About how his parents are murdered. Oh my gosh. I feel like isn't blue. Blue is the female dog, right? I thought that because the other one's like named magenta or something like that. I've only known blue from Blue's Clues because it's in the fucking name. Yeah, magenta is the name of the other one. Oh, wait.
00:05:36
Speaker
Okay, no blue. Magenta is a female dog. That would make more sense from the classic boy-girl color scheming. And blue is also female. Okay. They're both female dogs. Okay. Oh, shit. Life is a lie. They're going to kick you from the fan club. Oh, no.
00:05:56
Speaker
Well, they already kicked the other guy out of the fan club for her reasons. Um, yeah, awkward. Uh, probably, probably not one of the best anime I think to come out. So that's fine. No, there, there were a lot of awkward pauses and I hate when I hate when media has awkward pauses.
00:06:15
Speaker
See, I realize this is supposed to be the segue or something like that. There is the pause. No, I was hoping that we would pause for comedic effect. Ah, OK. No, there's kind of in there. You can just like stretch that out a little bit in post. I just heard you say pause in context with Blue's Clues. And I was going to make sure that you either got full or no credit for it by interrupting. I would like full credit, please. Speaking of full credit, though,
Arcades vs. Digital Gaming
00:06:45
Speaker
Sometimes we play video games and video games, many of them originated in arcades where in order to get credits to continue playing, you would put coins into machines. But since then, the industry has moved on and now you can download games such as Loop Hero on Steam.
00:07:06
Speaker
The crazy thing is that nobody's going to believe me, but that was fully written down and Jake better work for work. It takes like seven days of prep to come up with a segue. Recites in mirror. Hey, we need to run lines one more time. What's my next?
00:07:24
Speaker
Yeah, the number of times like the number of times I have to say next across like the podcast and then Dave's like, all right, we're going to have to cut this out, too. This is your line. I don't think you guys realize how much editing I do in a week. Even when I'm the one that edits the intro and outro, I have to send it to Dave first to get the first draft. Could I have the clean version V3? Thank you. Yeah. Been checking out some Loop Hero.
00:07:54
Speaker
That's a game. So anyways, it's a game about pixels, as many games are. But in particular, it's another tough to classify one. I'm going to ask what genre is you think it's in. I'm going to look up the Steam tags, because I tried to establish this as a recurring bit, and then I forget every time.
00:08:16
Speaker
All right. So the overall mechanic, and I'm going to explain that to give myself a chance to think about the genre. The overall mechanic is you have a character who moves around the loop automatically and will fight monsters and you will get rewards. And then each time you go through the loop, it gets progressively more difficult. Yes. So it's almost like an auto babbler in a sense. Mm-hmm.
00:08:40
Speaker
But the items you get from killing enemies you can equip based on whatever your quote unquote build strategy is, which I don't think that makes a huge difference, but it definitely helps if you have other things that are benefiting from, oh, this gives me counter, this will proc on counter.
00:08:59
Speaker
Yeah. And the other thing that can drop real quick are the cards and cards will essentially be tiles you can place on the grid around the loop. And that will either spawn enemies or give bonuses. Right.
00:09:15
Speaker
So I did have to
Loop Hero: Mechanics and Strategies
00:09:16
Speaker
chance to look up the tags now that you establish some of this. Is it auto battler? Auto battler is not in here, but there are five tags. What do you think any of them are? RPG? It's not, no RPG. Fuck. Yeah. NSFW? No, that's a fan mod.
00:09:34
Speaker
I don't know which version you were playing. I'm trying to think what tags are on Steam. So these would have surprised me too, actually. Some of them are pretty basic. So just the top five, ND, 2D. OK. OK. Fair. Very basic, right? Fair and true. Deck building. Interesting. Which is fair. It has that component. Ah.
00:09:58
Speaker
Well, it is because you construct what cards can show up in your run. And like, so you unlock cards that you can have in your deck, but it's not like I'm going to put four copies of, you know, fireball or whatever in my deck.
00:10:15
Speaker
Yeah, that's where my issue is. Okay. Because I think of deck building more like Slay the Spire. You have a deck, you modify it, or obviously with magic, you are tooling the deck. With this, it's like, what seven to 13 cards am I going to have show up in this run?
00:10:34
Speaker
Yeah, and it's that's what it is. Okay, there's no modification beyond that I think there's something there there is it's fair that there's implicit if someone says deck building you think that your decks gonna evolve throughout the course of a run and that's not how this game works you unlock cards throughout the course of the game and then before commencing a run you pick which ones which ones will be in the in the draw pool and
00:10:59
Speaker
Or if you're me, you will forget that constantly and be like, why hasn't this one card showed up? Oh, so that was that was one of them. And we should talk about the cards, obviously. I think it's one of the core features of the game. The last two, I don't think either of us probably would have guessed, but choices matter and tactical. Those are those makes more sense. Yeah, choices matter. Ah.
00:11:27
Speaker
It's vague. It's a little too vague for me too. Cause like the choices you make are around placing the cards in the world. That's tactics. And that's tactics. Placing something on a grid and like how it's going to impact other things is 100% tactics. Yeah. Choices matters usually left for like story games, right? Like divergent plot lines, things like that. Yeah.
00:11:53
Speaker
So that's a little weird, but made by Four Quarters. It's a Polish company and or Polish developer and published by Devolver Digital or an old standby. Devolver Digital. Also shout out to Poland. I miss you. I probably won't be going back anytime soon, but yeah.
00:12:11
Speaker
They wouldn't, they wouldn't let you. Yeah. Um, no, that's fair. Uh, I think so the basic, the premise of this game is you are the hero. Um, the titular title, uh, character and your name is Lou.
00:12:35
Speaker
For some reason my brain went to, like, Cocoa Puffs. I was like, no, it's Fruit Loops. Go to Fruit Loops. Fruit Loops joke. And in the opening cut scene or what have you, your world is basically disassembled into nothingness by the Lich, who is the initial antagonist.
00:13:02
Speaker
in the game and I'm sure it's in the description too, but I'm just gonna talk like a whole bunch of spoilers because I just have to. This is who I am. Do we wanna leave it there? Do we wanna build off that? I think we can build off that just a little bit. So you, I think you go back to the camp first. Oh no, you don't, you drop into the first loop like immediately. Yeah, the tutorial loop.
00:13:28
Speaker
And it's just a pathway that is sort of randomly generated. There's some random curves and stuff in it, but it loops back on itself with a campfire being the start and the stop. And then everything else is abyss.
00:13:43
Speaker
Yeah. So when you're in a run, you're going through killing those enemies, getting those cards, and you start out with the default set of cards, but you will then place them and kind of like build up the world, so to speak, from nothingness. But again, those things you're building are either to spawn enemies to kill to get loot and XP faster.
00:14:07
Speaker
because every time you go through a loop, it gets harder. So strategically, it makes sense to fight more enemies at a lower level early versus fighting slimes for 17 levels and then being like, I'm going to ruin my life. Yeah. Because different enemies will give better drops as well. And then other things that bonuses like
00:14:31
Speaker
I think you start out with rocks and meadows. Rocks will give you more max health and meadows for each day cycle as you're going through the loop will recover some HP, which is a good way to restore. But if you build too many of some of those terrain tiles, it's like,
00:14:52
Speaker
You modified the world enough. You built a mountain peak. Harpies will now spawn. What up? So that's another way to accelerate the pace of the game. Yeah. Most of the decisions you make will end up creating more difficult encounters across the loop.
00:15:09
Speaker
But it's not always bad. The more enemies that are in a loop, the more loot you'll have. Personal equipment you can slot out. There's different classes and they have different equipment slots and different stats that roll for those classes. Fighting a lot of enemies every loop
00:15:31
Speaker
means that you have plenty of opportunities to get better gear, right? But it could also just be really difficult and you can die and end the run. It becomes a bit of a balancing act based on how well you think you're going to do in the next loop. Because once you're at the end of the loop, you have the option if you've marked it to, oh, I'm done with my expedition. I'll take my resources, my winnings, and go back to main base, which is the main menu.
00:15:59
Speaker
Or you could maybe play a little bit too greedy and die. Yeah. So like you learn a little bit with, Oh, I have enough vampirism and attack speed. I should be fine to regain enough health to survive this next loop. No times you're like, I don't want to chance it.
00:16:14
Speaker
But even if you do diamond run, you'll still take some of your resources back. Um, there's actually two leave states. Like you can leave in the middle of a run as long as you're not in a fight and you get like 60% of your stuff. If you die, you only get to take 30%. And if you leave at the campfire, you get a campfire, you get a hundred percent. Yeah.
00:16:35
Speaker
I've done a mix of those, depending on how bad things are going. Yeah. There's also a currency. I can't remember the exact name of the item, but they're the skulls. I call them alluring skulls, because that's what they look like to me. They really do. That you get only from defeating bosses that allows you to, should you die, you can use some of those skulls to take everything, instead of having to leave anything behind.
00:17:03
Speaker
So that can be really nice if you're going for a really long farming run, where you're just like, I've got tons of tiles placed that are generating tons of enemy types that drop things that I specifically want. And certain drops, there's all of these different currency things, different types of items. It's almost like Path of Exile in the way items kind of build together.
00:17:26
Speaker
to make like the next tier but there's only the base item and then one tier above that. It's just collecting scraps of paper to make things reminds me of Path of Exile. I was like thinking about all of Path of Exile's mechanics and like I don't remember this one. No, just the like minor items becoming major items. Yes.
00:17:45
Speaker
And so if you have that escape button, you know that you have enough skulls that even should you die, you'll get all of your resources. You can continue to do loop after loop after loop. And I don't know if we said it, but every single loop gets harder. It makes the enemy stronger.
00:18:03
Speaker
One thing that's nice is like if you are competent or confident enough, you can kind of just let it ride and just let it keep going through. Your character will automatically fight. Each character and the enemies have their own. I'm going to attack this many times a second. These are my stats and it'll just play out. That's the auto-battler part, the feel for it, right?
00:18:25
Speaker
But mid fight, you can like mouse over equipment to say like, oh, I'm fighting four enemies at once versus just one. Maybe I want to equip this weapon I have in my loot bag that's going to do damage to all each time I attack to like help clear. Or maybe you're like, I need to put counter stats on immediately so I don't die. Yeah.
00:18:49
Speaker
Because anytime you don't use items, if your bag fills up, it'll start voiding them to the A there. Same with cards. So if you hold on to it too long, and sometimes you don't care because it may be just like a shitty drop, doesn't really provide any bonuses for you. You're like, I don't need it. Don't want to waste it.
00:19:06
Speaker
You can just let it go. And it does give you like some basic resource like if items are destroyed that way you get metal.
Loop Hero: Classes and Boss Strategies
00:19:15
Speaker
Yeah, little metal pieces. And if cards are destroyed that way you get like paper that can turn into scrolls. So there's actually like
00:19:23
Speaker
I don't know if I've ever shown you like, like one of my successful in-game attack speed runs, but like I'll be clearing out enemies super, super fast and it's just like five cards immediately burn off and they're just like all going to paper at the top. It's really great in the end game.
00:19:44
Speaker
It can be in the end game. But yeah, these cards that we're talking about, there's a balancing. You have to pick between. There's different types. So there's road type cards, roadside cards, landscape cards, special cards, and golden cards. And you only get to pick one golden card. But they're usually build defining in some way. They're very much impacting the way that you're going to play that run.
00:20:13
Speaker
and like you were talking about like the landscape cards earlier like the meadows and the the mountains or the the rocks and those are like basic stats anytime you get those cards you can just put them somewhere else out there in the world and they'll give you like attack speed or health or like rivers which like double the adjacency bonuses for anything on either side
00:20:38
Speaker
or freaking sand dunes, which is one I tried to play around with a little bit. As soon as I read it, I'm like, it's not going to be as good as I think it is. I think it has a place for farming builds, but it reduces everything's health. Everything's max health, including you. Oh, yeah. That's less helpful.
00:21:00
Speaker
But it's it's such a nominal amount. You really have to Stack a lot of them to see The effect. Yeah, but like there were times where I was playing rogue who has two weapons boots and I think a chest piece But their whole thing is just like i'm pissing out damage because I have two weapons. That's why it's encouraged You put a lot of attack speed on them. They have some a small bit of built-in vampirism
00:21:26
Speaker
Mm-hmm, but you're just getting out the slaps before they can attack so you can possibly wipe enemies quickly So you have like this whole fucking forest you've built And that's really nice. Yeah attack speed rogue To my experimentation is like the strongest
00:21:42
Speaker
in the game so far for clearing stuff. I didn't play late game warrior a lot. I played mostly rogue and necromancer, which is the third unnamed class. But yeah, one of the golden cards, you can only pick one golden card. They were like ancestral crypt, zero milestone, maze of memories and arsenal.
00:22:06
Speaker
And arsenal is basically what I played with for like the entirety of the end game. So we did 99% of evil. Because it gives like for rogue, it gives you an amulet slot. And the amulet slot can roll a stat that's just or it always rolls a stat, which is like magical shield.
00:22:26
Speaker
And it's just amazingly good on Rogue because you can get chipped down encounter by encounter without it. But with Magic Shield, it refreshes at the start of every single fight and suddenly the enemies aren't actually doing damage to you as you.
00:22:43
Speaker
like no to run through them attacking them 5,000 times. Yeah, it's like a nice resetting over shield. Necromancer has that by default because their health doesn't really scale so much. And their whole thing is. And they have the amulet slot is where it comes from. Yes. Yeah. So Necromancer will summon skeletons to fight for them. Yeah. And if they've summoned all their skeletons, they will attack as well. But you hit like a fucking little wet noodle and it sucks. So really your whole bill is around skeletons.
00:23:14
Speaker
Well, it's actually better not to attack sometimes with necromancer too. There's like certain enemies that only attack you when you attack them. Um, and so I've actually hurt my, I've, I've gotten myself killed by attacking necromancer because I had too many skeletons. It's just, it's unfortunate, but like once you summon your max amount of skeletons, which is another stat you can fuck around with. You gotta just be like, I don't know what to do now. Punch them.
00:23:41
Speaker
He just runs to the front of the of his like army line. He's like I've got him It's like the one king who like moves in front of all the pawns like follow me
00:23:54
Speaker
But one thing that's nice about the distinguishing of the classes, it's not just the innate gear slots you have and some of those built-in stats that you can get. It's more so as you get experience, you can level up and then pick traits, which if you know me, I fucking love passive abilities and any type of game. I'm like, how can I stack these for good effect?
00:24:18
Speaker
And I feel Necromancer probably does this the best because they have a lot of synergies for feeding into, I'm going to keep summoning skeletons. But it feels really cool to get those perks. And then you probably shape the gear that you're going to select around that. Yeah. I've definitely built my rogue around attack speed only. And if I don't get old scars as my first perk, I'm like, fuck, fuck, fuck.
00:24:46
Speaker
Because Old Scars is a really good passive ability that whenever you kill an enemy, Rogue will always just get a trophy. And when the trophies, when you get back to the campfire, they're all cashed in and then you get your items. But Old Scars will give you a point of max health per trophy you get. And you're like, man, that seems really good to get early.
00:25:08
Speaker
And it is. And you can also get another passive trait where if you fight three or more enemies, you get an extra trophy. So like that with attack speed, you're just killing stuff, but then you keep scaling because you don't die. It's beautiful.
00:25:23
Speaker
No, it's it's fairly ridiculous. I think that is probably the best one for rogue It's like so there's a there's like a normal pool of traits that anyone can get and I consider most of those trash I think they're all like bad to actually see show up and then there's like
00:25:38
Speaker
class ones. Were there any good ones in there? Well, there's one you can get. I've definitely unlocked them all and we probably didn't even unlock the same pool. But one that I thought was decent was 40% chance that when you use a potion, it doesn't get expended. That's fair. Yeah. I didn't really build around potions like a ton because I didn't try to, but
00:26:00
Speaker
It's kind of like a lose less strategy and sort of like a win more strategy. So I tend to go like hyper aggressive. Again, attack speed rogue, right? Like we both played that out. The one I really like for rogue is there's four health for every enemy killed. That one's really nice. Obviously max health is really nice.
00:26:22
Speaker
And then actually, my game winning run, I had a boss specific trait. So there's three bosses and then a final boss beyond that. And every time you beat a boss, the game's like, you can pick from one of these three traits or you can pick resources. And they usually make the resources pretty tempting. It's like some stuff you're like, I really need that back at the camp.
00:26:46
Speaker
I could build some stuff with this. But if you pick one of those traits, it adds it to your rollable pool of traits. And now it'll show up for future runs. And there was one from the priestess Sigma that has mirror images. And so on kill, you get a mirror image. And if you have three of them up, it's like 60% chance that they'll just attack against you. And then 40% chance, then 20% chance, whatever.
00:27:16
Speaker
really nice for a rogue when you're going up against the final boss or what have you and it's just like you're attacked at nothing. Yeah, mitigation like that becomes really huge because you can get evasion and counter, but I think both of those eats your stamina. Yeah.
00:27:35
Speaker
So you'll attack on whatever your attack time is based on your attack speed. But if you're evading and encountering a lot of things, it eats your stamina. So you might dodge five things in a row, but now you can't attack right away because you just burned all your stamina.
00:27:50
Speaker
So again, everything becomes a bit of a trade off and you kind of learn it as you go. Definitely from like the first time you play a run after the tutorial, you're like, I kind of get the hang of this. But then you learn little ways as you're going to capitalize on things. And then you find also more efficient ways to like lay out stuff on the grid.
00:28:14
Speaker
Cuz every time I like would do certain things like oh, this is the best way to do it And then I watch YouTube video like oh, I'm fucking stupid You find ways to optimize like oh, I'm gonna place these road tiles here for these groves Which as you pass you can get a branch which goes into wood and
00:28:32
Speaker
It will spawn a rat wolf, which is like a pretty basic enemy, not too hard to deal with. And then adjacent to those, or technically forests, you can build a blood grove, which will, if you get something 15% or below of its max health, it will instantly die.
00:28:49
Speaker
Yeah. It gets eaten by roots. And you're like, hey, did this work against bosses? Yup. So you start planning around that. Yes. Or it's really effective in corners because it has a one, quote unquote, ring of grid adjacency. Yeah. So you start clumping things together to be more effective.
00:29:09
Speaker
And the whole reason you do that and you can't just spamble a bunch of shit is each time you're building and modifying the world, you're building up this, I know I'm rambling and I'm sorry, I'll stop. I know you're good. You're good. You're building up this boss meter. So if you build, let's say 100 things, the boss will then spawn at the campfire and you have to fight them or leave. Yeah.
00:29:32
Speaker
So if you ramp up too fast, you'll fight the boss early. It can be good. Maybe you don't want to. It's up to you. Yeah, the trade-off is everything's getting harder, every loop, including the boss. The boss gets stronger every loop. So if you just like, you're like, I'm just not going to place any more cards. Well, eventually the trash mobs that are just spawning are going to kill you before the boss shows up. But also if you get to the boss, it could be a bad time.
00:29:56
Speaker
But you're getting stronger too. You're getting levels, getting gear. I just wanted to mention real quick, you mentioned Blood Grove. Blood Grove is actually like my candidate for the best card in the game. I think it may legitimately just have the highest impact. Like you could throw other trash monsters in there, but killing at 15% health, including bosses. And then there's one particular enemy, there's ruins.
00:30:23
Speaker
which makes like artillery worms spawn that like spit fire. They're really obnoxious because if you reach a square and the worms are the square after that, they'll join the fight as support units. Like just firing on you. They just also hit you. Yeah, exactly. They're in the background if this is like a tactics game, just firing on you. And that's not ideal. So you want to put them, you want them to spawn with a blank space.
00:30:50
Speaker
before you reach them, right, so that they're not optimizing other fights against you. But they have a 40 percent chance to just flee like at the end of fight. Instead of dying, they just flee. And that really sucks. It makes it like an obnoxious enemy to deal with because that that land spawns and it spawns enemies as you're going through and looping. Like there's a day cycle that happens all the time. Like time is passing regardless of the loop.
00:31:20
Speaker
and that spawns the enemies and this these these enemies and the ruins very often just have five worms just there all the time because like you keep killing them in quotes but they just run away and it's such a pain until you place one grove nearby and now they're like taken out of the fight at 15 percent health and reliably die and i'm just like bless grove
00:31:43
Speaker
So good. I think I placed whatever that was for the worms. Wants to try out the card. There's some cards I didn't even play because one's like, oh, this will spawn mosquitoes. And anytime you gain life, you lose life. I'm like, yeah, whatever. Fucking play this card. And I've never touched it.
00:32:05
Speaker
I think it depends how you want to build. Blood Grove is definitely a part of my kit. Forests, of course, because you can build attack speed, which I think is good on any class. Storm temples occasionally.
00:32:21
Speaker
I didn't play enough with those and you try those more. You mentioned that like blood grove can also be built like next to forest. I actually remove grove entirely. I didn't like the wolfman or the ratman over there because they would move between tiles. And so I was like, no, I want a deterministic board. No RNG here. So I was like, just put forest on the outside and then I put the little blood groves next to it.
00:32:46
Speaker
That works too. The one card I was mentioning, the Storm Temple, kind of like a rook, whether it's the row rank or file, row or column. If it overlaps a tile where you are fighting, every five seconds it will, I think, deal damage to two random enemy units, or two random units, I should say. Yes, random units. So it can be you, or one of your units.
00:33:15
Speaker
But it deals X amount of damage plus a bonus to whatever armor they have based on how many loops. So you can like stack that for a boss fight or just cover like a whole section of loop to kind of help you out. Again, it could possibly hurt you. But I think that was fun to play around with because then there are other things you can do like, oh, this will manipulate time for adjacent things.
00:33:43
Speaker
Does this happen every so often? It's now doubled. It'll happen twice as often. So you can use that to spawn enemies more, make your character move faster. Did you, for the Storm Temple, did you see its energy? Did you find its energy in your playthrough?
00:34:01
Speaker
with the passive item in the camp? With a terrain. I didn't know the passive item in the camp. What was that? We're doing spoilers. Just tell me what you got. I'm looking for strats. Are you talking about with forests? Yes, forests.
00:34:18
Speaker
Yeah. So if you have a storm temple with a forest that is within the firing line, so to speak, it will make it a burnt forest. So it will give you just bonus flat magic damage instead of attack speed. I didn't like that. It's good in certain things, but really the attack speed I find is better than the trade off for how much magic damage you get. Right.
00:34:44
Speaker
But the magic damage is essentially pure in this game. Is that right? I think it is. I'm not actually sure. So I saw the Burned Forest first and I was like, oh, plus magic damage. As soon as I unlock the magic dealing class, I'm going to use this. There isn't one. That doesn't exist. It's just like bonus damage. Yeah, don't make the mistake I made. I think it can be good if you have a lot of
00:35:08
Speaker
forests already. So I got the achievement for filling the map, just placing something in every possible spot. I think I did that once too, just because I was at like loop 17. I'm like, yeah, I know there's going to be achievement. Let's go. Just so you can get it. And if you have just forests and rivers, which was the only one, those were my two terrain types, rivers, double adjacency bonus, forests, plus attack speed,
00:35:32
Speaker
It's like I have over 400% like bonus attack speed Let's go. That's one where I could have afforded to drop a temple maybe and
00:35:43
Speaker
Uh, get some extra damage there because it probably, probably would have helped me a little bit more than just attacking even faster. And you mentioned stamina. If you attack like a bunch, then you're, you'll run out of stamina and your attack speed bonus goes away entirely until you get your stamina back. Um, that happened a lot with me with rogue too. Yeah. Cause I'd be like, and there's like an enemy left. I'm like, I gotta, gotta, gotta take a breather. Yeah.
00:36:12
Speaker
There's another one, another thing that I consider essential. So I posted a screenshot of my deck building menu, so I could reference the cards here for this. I'm like, oh, this is convenient, because these are basically everything I used. And the bookery is one of them. It's relatively basic. Every time you pass it, it just, I think it was three or four cards, get swapped out, like you redraw four cards.
00:36:38
Speaker
And that was really nice because that allowed me to put like cards in my initial deck that I didn't plan to put like all over the map.
Loop Hero: Card Synergies and Meta-Progression
00:36:48
Speaker
but I could reliably exchange them in the early game if I got a bookery. It's definitely nice because, like you said, you're not going to use every card. Or sometimes, if you have forests in your deck, essentially it can spawn two different types of cards. One is forests, which is a 1% attack speed bonus, or thickets with two Cs. And it's a 2% attack speed bonus. So I would essentially say, fuck forests.
00:37:15
Speaker
Maybe I'd use them for burned forests because both thickets and forests become burned forests with temples. Yeah. But yeah, usually you want to find I want to draw on something I give a shit about versus placing something willy nilly and then you have to do a boss encounter earlier than you want to because your build's not online, so to speak. Mm hmm. Yeah.
00:37:36
Speaker
Because the diversity is awesome. No, stop. You have to have a certain number of cards in your deck. Like Jake was saying he had two terrain types. That's the minimum amount of terrain types you can have. You have to have two, or at least two. And there's some other things like you have to have two road tile types.
00:38:03
Speaker
Right? Yeah. So I think I went Grove and Cemetery. Yeah.
00:38:10
Speaker
Yeah, I went village. I use village and vampire mansion for like, it was my old standby. It's kind of one of these strats. Yeah. Like if you, so if you put a village down, it's like when you walk through it, you heal a bit, presumably like short rest in the village or whatever. Right. Um, and, uh, then you get a quest, which means one enemy somewhere on the map ahead of you.
00:38:37
Speaker
Or just somewhere on the map, doesn't have to be ahead of you if you're midway through the loop. It's a loop, so they're always ahead of you. It becomes elite, basically. Yeah, become elite. They get a bunch of health, and they have some special leaf markers. And when you kill it, you complete the quest. The next time you go back through the village, they'll give you an item.
00:38:58
Speaker
But screw that mechanic. Put a vampire mansion adjacent to the village and the vampire will like turn everybody in the village into ghouls. And now you have like four or five people you're fighting reliably on every pass through.
00:39:18
Speaker
And you can't complete quests so it's nice because you get more drops Yeah, there's a lot of cool Interactions with that that I definitely did not Experiment with or utilize as much. I'm just like this seems to work for me. I continue to do it until I found some other interaction like oh, maybe we could use that mm-hmm
00:39:43
Speaker
I put rivers near the road one time and then it spawned fish people. I'm like, oh shit, I did not expect that. That was a cool thing they added. And then I never did it again because it interfered with my current build.
00:40:00
Speaker
Yeah. I do like, uh, you mentioned the fish people, like the first time you run into vampires, first time you run into fish people, the game like switches to dialogue mode and you'll like talk to them for a bit. Um, and it's, it's a nice little, um, please, this, this person that I'm encountering don't attack me. And they're always like, we're going to attack you. Like they always attack you. Peace was never an option.
00:40:26
Speaker
That's clobbering something. Yeah, but it's nice. The game plays a little bit with everything that you're building is through your force of will, and you're intentionally returning things into reality. And then the game spawns harpies, or the game spawns fish people, or vampires, or something.
00:40:53
Speaker
I didn't really, maybe vampires, you kind of asked for a little bit more, but like I didn't intend this. It just showed up. And so the hero is a little bit surprised whenever some of these other individuals show up, which is, which I find, I find kind of funny.
00:41:14
Speaker
Overall, this is like a brief aside because I want to tangent into this right now. I didn't care about the plot of the game whatsoever. But one interaction I really did enjoy is if you build 10 forests, it spawns a, what is it called?
00:41:29
Speaker
Village, question mark. Village, question mark. So there'll be wooden replicas. Because I first did this as the warrior, I believe. So it made a copy of me. And it's like, hey, you've been rebuilding the forest. We want to pay tribute to you. We won't attack you, though. But feel free to cut us down. We might respond out of self-defense, but we can't help it. And you're like, OK. So these enemies will only counter-attack you. Yep. Cool.
00:41:59
Speaker
Didn't think too much of it. Did another run as the rogue and your hero is technically the same hero loosely a model. It's just the class is different. Hair's a little bit different. So when you encounter them again, because of course you're going to build forests when you're the rogue, it's like you have this certain dialogue of like, oh, hey. And they're like, we don't know who the fuck you are.
00:42:23
Speaker
Because you're a rogue class and not the warrior. And it's like, die. They still only counter attack. But they don't recognize you, which I thought was interesting. Yeah. No, I actually really like the village question mark. There's another hidden synergy with that. If you build planes next to a village question mark, they become abandoned planes or something like that.
00:42:47
Speaker
there's swords in it and it like makes like sword ghosts or sword golems or something like that there. It's freaking weird. But I like the necromancer because the necromancer doesn't attack unless all of your summon slots are full. So like you go up against village question mark and these guys are like, we will only attack those that attack us. And you're just so many skeletons all over the place that are throwing themselves at them.
00:43:15
Speaker
Yeah. Again, I think Necromancer really has the most fun build synergy as you level up because you can get a trait where if your skeletons die, they will heal you. If you take damage without magic shield, it'll be distributed to all your skeletons. That in itself is kind of like a nice feedback loop. You can buff your max number of skeletons through passive outside of gear.
00:43:43
Speaker
You can theoretically spawn like a horde of skeletons at the start of your run. Oh, yeah. Yeah. To like help it out. There's just a lot of fun stuff with it. I did want to mention for people trying to beat the game, I really liked initially, I really liked on paper the damage split with the skeletons, but I found that I died with it more often just because there's a mechanic in the game where the more summons you have, the less likely you are to be attacked.
00:44:11
Speaker
And so if there was too many enemies off the get go, they would be hitting me rapidly enough that I could never summon up my full army of skeletons. And I was splitting damage to them. They never took the damage from me other than this indirect sharing. And because it was more important for me to get my army up so they could actually start tanking, I wiped myself by picking up that perk. So I don't recommend that.
00:44:35
Speaker
I've definitely done it more than once. I feel like we need other things in the kit for it to be more viable for sure. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mirror image. It's really good. Do you want to talk about anything at the home base, as I'm calling it?
00:44:53
Speaker
We should, yeah. So like the home base, the camp, you get there after your very first loop. And actually, I think you don't even complete your loop to the boss. It's like you make like a certain number of loops and like the camp shows up or something like that.
00:45:10
Speaker
Um, but basically this is where the base building sort of mechanic comes in and this is the meta progression and the broke like, so to speak. Um, you're unlocking mechanics, you're unlocking research, you're unlocking, um, items slots, stuff like that. Right.
00:45:32
Speaker
And like you unlock some significant upgrades, including like single resurrection per run. That's a pretty nice one. You unlock just static stat increases, potions, things like that. There's just so much you can get out of the camp. This is where all of the resource dump that you were accumulating from your runs goes.
00:45:55
Speaker
Yeah. So it's nice to invest in and you're pretty much almost always going to. And then as you build more things, you get the option to unlock other cards. Yeah. Which you can then slot for like, oh, this will be better for my run for my next expedition. You also have the option to upgrade a lot of those buildings as well. Yeah. So maybe it's like, oh, unlocks an extra potion unlocks three extra potions and they heal more. You're like, dear God, please, I need it.
00:46:26
Speaker
I even liked more so later on Because you feel like you're it is a bit of a grind at some points Yeah, it is especially if you're kind of hitting a roadblock of I can't get past this one level You have the option later on to do alchemy Mm-hmm where it's like hey, I want to get rid of this item for like generic points and then you spend those points to make another resource and
00:46:49
Speaker
But the key thing is you have to have disassembled that resource first. So you can't be like, I have a million wood. I disassemble all my wood to make this thing that I've never heard of. Uh-huh. But it's cool if you're locked to like, oh, I just need this, but I'm struggling to run to like, oh, I'm going to make up the metal with all the wood because I only ever play gross. Right. Exactly. Yeah, no, it's, uh, I enjoyed that. I'm as stated for every rogue, like,
00:47:20
Speaker
I am a huge fan of meta progression because it takes something that could be, I consider too difficult at initial balancing. And it's kind of like a catch all for the developer. They're like, I might have screwed this up in case I did.
00:47:35
Speaker
You can keep getting stronger by spending money at the village. I didn't feel like the bosses were too tough for me with one exception. I did a lot of time farming because I was just really enjoying the game. I was really enjoying trying to find different card interactions and synergies.
00:47:58
Speaker
And so I honestly didn't even attempt fighting bosses until like, until way down the line. I did like tons of runs just like right now I tap out before the boss shows up. But I like them. I think like you can employ strategies to defeat each of them.
00:48:18
Speaker
Blood groves. Yeah. Yeah. Blood. Yes. Blood groves do help a lot. So how long, uh, how long did it take you to defeat army crown, which is the, the Litch we mentioned so long ago at the beginning of this discussion? I kind of like you, uh, did grind the first level a lot without fighting the boss. And then I think I fought him.
00:48:43
Speaker
three times the first time i didn't understand part of what the mechanic was i'm like oh shit and later on there's something called oblivion cards where it will just wipe a tile away and any units are on it so if you're like oh i didn't mean to place that there oops or if you're building up towards the boss meter be like um i want it i don't want the boss yet you can remove something entirely so we'll take that back down or
00:49:11
Speaker
You can use it against this boss when the boss spawns if you didn't already plan for it ahead of time, and I'll leave it at that. Very, very, very overly obtuse. You're like leaving spoilers on the table. I already named all the bosses. Yeah. You have to go back and censor them if you want this not to be a full spoilers episode. I don't care about the names and stuff.
00:49:37
Speaker
Okay, I mean yeah, that's fair Dang that means I can't spoil everything So I did want to talk about like the plot a little bit because You've attacked me personally, but you know saying you didn't really care about the plot the plot was actually like a
Loop Hero: Story and Player Engagement
00:49:55
Speaker
The mystery of what was going on in the world was the thing that probably most drove me to complete the game. Everybody that you encounter is chipping away at the mystery, but they're introducing different elements to it.
00:50:16
Speaker
Increasingly, it becomes super implausible that everything that's going on makes sense. And your character calls that out. He's just like, I should not be able to do this. And those questions, I think, are really what drove me to finish out the game. I will say I'm going to avoid actual end of game spoilers.
00:50:43
Speaker
Yeah, I know. Well, you started it. I was going to not. And then you started it. The at the conclusion of those answers, I felt like I was satisfied with it. But it also like I realized I was basically done with the game. Right. Like there was some stuff I still could have unlocked as far as synergies. I could have done more meta progression. But
00:51:08
Speaker
I think I could still go back and play Hades, and I might go back and play Loop Hero a little bit, but Hades is very much a gameplay-driven game, and I would have a lot of fun even having beaten the story. Loop Hero, I feel like, especially in the late game when it's been going for a while, maybe a little bit less. Actually, less. I'm going to upgrade that to less.
00:51:37
Speaker
Once the story part was complete, I felt like I didn't need to play it anyway. I'm going to agree with part of that where after I watched the ending of the game, I was like, yeah, I'm good. You didn't need to play it anymore. I enjoyed the game initially for the aesthetic.
00:52:01
Speaker
But after a bit, it does feel kind of grindy to me because as I mentioned, I didn't really care about the story or personally find it engaging. I just thought it was a cute, fun thing to do after work before dinner. Just do a run.
00:52:17
Speaker
but it really doesn't change that much run to run. Whereas with Hades, you can unlock a pretty vast diversity, you can make it a lot more challenging, and it has so much personality in it as well on top of the really fast, good, responsive gameplay.
00:52:36
Speaker
Whereas this, I'm just watching a guy kick somebody else in the shins. I'm like, yeah, get them. But after the 37th time, it doesn't have the same spark to it. Yeah. I think that's fair. I feel like I kind of petered out because I wasn't getting what I wanted for my build in some runs. I probably did not find the optimizations that I needed.
00:52:58
Speaker
to be more effective, but it just felt kind of like, all right, like it's had its moment in the sun, but I don't feel I need to go back to it. But I did enjoy what I played. Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it. But to attack you again. Sure. I thought the initial story hook definitely engaging. But then it felt like it became, to use a term I used earlier, overly obtuse.
00:53:28
Speaker
like it feels like something I would have read on like a 4chan, somebody's just making like a long post type thing. Like I'm like, I could have come up with that or like, I don't know if it needed the story to go along with it. It just all felt kind of
00:53:49
Speaker
vague and a little wishy-washy. But again, that's my personal opinion. Yeah. I think to counterpoint your counterpoint. Yeah. I think that this story is very much a localized enemy, localized threat into expanded threat sort of story where everything that's portrayed initially to you were mild spoilers territory. That's maybe what we'll roll in there.
00:54:17
Speaker
Everything that's portrayed to you, you can kind of get a feel on or resolve and then move forward and everything amps up. Everything accelerates. Everything becomes much more dramatic, would be the way to put it.
00:54:35
Speaker
And I think that's fine. Like, I'm a fan of the subvert a little bit. Be like, here's the guy on the box art. He's the most prominent character. I don't know who these other two side ones are, but the Lich, he's up here massive. And like, yeah, he's the first boss.
00:54:59
Speaker
I also really like the writing. I think the writing is actually even more than like the plot. That's what drew me in because I was unlocking these people's like the character stories more like backstory in the world and lore and stuff like that. And I'm going to like talk here off about it and smash and I'll lose every single match. But that was the writing was actually, I think, engaging and good.
00:55:26
Speaker
Anyways, it was a 20 hour game. I enjoyed like 19 of those hours. I think that's pretty good for a $15 game. Oh, yeah. I think in general, if you.
00:55:39
Speaker
like Devolver Digital and the kind of stuff they put out.
Devolver Digital's Unique Games
00:55:44
Speaker
That's tough. You can't be like Devolver Digital. If you like carrying, you know, check out Libciro. My friend Pedro, they have some stuff that's like a little bit off the beaten path, but it's usually fun and engaging. Like I don't think they have anything it's like strictly in. It's all duty. Yeah, like one camp, like here's FPS and you're shooting, but the campaign is really serious type thing. Yeah.
00:56:09
Speaker
Like they're all serious. They don't do have an appeal to them
00:56:15
Speaker
So far, I've liked everything I've played from Devolver Digital, but not everything speaks to me. Like, I wouldn't play Ape Out, per se. Maybe I do enjoy it. I don't know. But I also think that my friend Pedro haven't tried Carrion, even though that was initially very much so on the curiosity list. I mean, I wouldn't see E3. I think it actually wasn't you talking about it. It didn't encourage me to try it.
00:56:43
Speaker
Yeah, I played the demo that killed my hype because I was like, it's OK. Then I came back and I played like the full game. I was like, it's better than the demo. That's good. Yeah. Well, it was more fun than the demo, I should say. So the demo might have actually I don't know. Save that for the carrying episode that'll never happen.
00:57:05
Speaker
Don't think loop here is gonna be in my game of the year But I was hyper engaged with it for the time I did spend in it. So Yeah, it falls under pleasantly surprising for how dumb. I thought it looked initially Mm-hmm. We just go around lube and attack shit. Okay, then I watched you play for now. I'm like this goddamn music. I
00:57:27
Speaker
Yeah, I give them points for doing something different. It's not really a deck builder. It's not really a roguelike. It's just some interesting mechanics thrown together. And even if it's a bit repetitive, even if there's some issues with it, it's a novel experience at the very least. And I think that if more developers were just putting out novel experiences, be like, what genre does this fit in?
00:57:53
Speaker
doesn't. That's okay. That's an okay answer sometimes. The industry could use more new ideas. So good job, four quarters, looking forward to five quarters in the future.
00:58:10
Speaker
I'm not going to save you from that one. When you change your company name for every subsequent release. If you guys have any possible company names to replace full quarters for their next release, you could send those into us for no apparent reason at soapstonepodcast.gmail.com or you can publicly suggest company names and allow other people to steal them.
00:58:34
Speaker
Facebook at Facebook.com slash soapstone podcast and as always we'll see you in the next one. Have a good night.