My recommendation is for Loop Hero, a game that has devoured 165 hours of my time, and I'm still left with several builds I want to try out. This is a one of a kind game, and I'd be surprised if it doesn't end on some Game of the Year lists for 2021.
The game is classified as a roguelike, but I'd say that this is a disservice to the game's true qualities by keeping some gamers away from it. Normally, roguelikes involve plenty of repetition, to the point of tedium, especially when it comes to the combat, which is also the weakest point of the genre. You just press the same button to trigger the same ability over and over again until the enemy is dead... for every battle... battle after battle. This is where the developers of Loop Hero did something incredible, by removing all the tedium from the battles. The battles auto-resolve, requiring no interaction from the player. The character auto-attacks, all skills have a change to proc triggering automatically, and if HP drops bellow a certain level, health potions are automatically consumed.
You might be worried that this would make the game boring, since you are left with nothing to do. Well, that's what's amazing about this game, because this gives you time to plan out your overall strategy. Here's a little spoiler from the intro of the game. Something happened to the world, and worse people seem to have forgotten everything about how the world used to be. All that remains is a long path that inevitably loops over upon itself. This is where the game starts, the hero automatically travels across a randomly generated looped road, while you as the player, are reconstructing the world by building structures which are available via cards. By placing a building you consume that card, but that building will start generating monsters, which once defeated have a chance to drop new cards or items that you can equip on the hero. This is where the strategy of the game starts, you need to plan out how you're going to rebuild this world, in the limited space available, in order to best take advantage of the synergies of the cards.
For example, you can build a village on the path, whose occupants will task the hero with slaying a particular monster, for which the hero will receive a reward, once he returns to the village via the looped path. But you can also place a vampire mansion next to the village, which will change it into a ransacked village. Basically, the vampire in its bloodlust will run amok, meaning that for future visits the hero will be attacked by the vampire and its minions. However, after a while(several turns), the vampire's thirst will be quenched, and it will rebuild the village and start protecting it, which will change the tile into "Count's Land", basically an upgraded version of the initial village, one that will give much higher quality items as rewards. This is just one of almost a hundred of such intriguing card/tile synergies.
Try as you might, especially in the beginning, you'll end up placing too many buildings, or unknowingly unlock a synergy that will create too many/powerful monsters and the hero will fall. This is where the meta progression comes in. Your hero awakens in a camp, where other survivors have gathered. A camp where you can use the materials that the hero found during its to make all of your lives better by improving the camp. That's right during your loops around the road you slowing collect building materials. Each building in your camp unlocks additional gameplay mechanics. Some buildings unlock new hero classes, others unlock transmuting surplus materials into materials that you lack, other allow crafting of camp items, that offer bonuses in the hero's future runs. And almost all the buildings unlock new cards.
These cards can be used to build a deck of cards, which is another point of strategy. You don't want too many cards in your deck, since that would dilute the card pool, creating long stretches of time when you're not finding the cards you actually need to build during your runs. So it's important to use the best synergies, in as small a deck of cards as possible. This in turn, ensures an emergent gameplay mechanic. As much as you try to optimize your deck, you can't possible collect every type of material you need for your camp, in a single run. So you might end up creating special optimized decks for collecting wood, or metal, or any of the 12 materials available in the game.
All of this might sound overwhelming to a new player, but the developers took care to ease us into the game, by not unlocking everything from the start. Instead even 20 hours in, I was still unlocking new game mechanics and cards. And card is nowhere more apparent than when you build the Library, and you finally unlock the encyclopedia, which collects and explains everything from the game. It's at this point that I discovered another remarkable design choice that I've never seen in any other game. Have you ever played a game, and while in the middle of a cutscene you accidentally press a button, and the game skips the cutscene? Well in Loop Hero, the encyclopedia collects all the dialog, and you can review it at any point in the future you might want.
Finally the game is expertly crafted with an attention to ludonarrative consistency. I'm not going to spoil anything, but as I said the world from the game is forgotten. You are rebuilding the world, and the hero fights and defeats monsters and as a result collects materials. One of these materials are "memory fragments". Once you get enough fragments, they are collected into "Books of Memories", which you use at the Library in camp, to expanded the encyclopedia with additional background narrative. And there are so many such example where the world building is happening not by generic exposition, but by the game's mechanics.
The developers clearly poured their hearts in to this game, and they deserve all the success they got for this amazing game. In fact the game received such praised, and turned out so successful, that the developers have said that they are hard at work adding more features and cards to the game.
Post edited April 05, 2021 by MadalinStroe
