Loop Hero review – Round and round the garden…

Editor’s note: Hello! Over the next few days we’re running a “Games That Got Away” series, where we finally get round to reviewing games that released at some point in 2021 but, for various reasons, we couldn’t quite manage to cover at the time.

In Loop Hero you don’t walk in circles, you walk in loops. Each procedurally created path leads back to its own beginning, but the shape will have a few kinks and bends. It reminds me a bit of those natural artworks formed by the discarded rubber bands that the people who deliver post leave behind them as they make their rounds. Rounds which are frequently loops, I’ve just realised, and not circles.

Loop Hero review

• Publisher: Devolver Digital
• Developer: Four Quarters
• Platform: Played on PC and Switch
• Availability: Out now on PC and Switch

Loop Hero is quite simple really, but it can be a faff to explain. Let’s get to it. It’s an RPG, with all the monsters, loot, quests and bosses you might expect. There’s even a story – quite a good one, about a world that has ended but could yet be rescued, brought back to life one chunk at a time. It has heroes and classes and all that stuff, but what marks it out, what makes it different, is that it doesn’t let you directly control the hero. Not really. You can’t fight their battles or choose their next objective. Instead, you keep them kitted out with the best stuff and you start them and stop them as they walk around their loop, a tiny little pixel person in a dinky pixel world, a charismatic presence straight out of the Commodore 64.

The world is a loop here, that rubber band the postie left on the floor. At first there’s not much to it, just a few low-level enemies that your hero whacks as they walk their circuits. Enemies drop loot, which you can pick through to improve your hero’s stats, and they drop cards, and cards are more interesting.

Cards allow you to piece back some of the world. Take the world of the loop. You might place swamps on it, or graveyards. You might push vampire castles up against it, or light it with beacons. Those are just early cards. All of this stuff will spawn new monsters on the loop for you to bash, or will change the way things work on tiles. A good card might make you attack faster! A bad card might spawn a weird time-travelling horror who turns up to make stuff difficult. But is that really a bad card, or is there something great about it, waiting to be understood?