ChaosTonyV4 posted...
This is such a crazy turn, when it first came out, everyone was absolutely RAVING about it.
I know why. I have a rule about roguelikes and similarly replayable, procedurally-generated games. They all live three lives. The first is between 0-10 hours of play; the next is between 10-50 hours of play; and the last is after 50 hours of play.
In the first phase, before 10 hours played (although this number is not exact, it could be as few as 1-2 or as many as 20-30 depending on the game's complexity), the player is learning the game and coming face to face with the game's new concepts for the first time. This is often the most exciting period of playing a new roguelike or roguelike-adjacent; you are learning a new system and discovering new things in it constantly, making progress or gaining skill very quickly, and nearly everything is immediately novel. The promise of depth in the game seems grand, and the promise of possibilities seem virtually endless. A player might win a run in this time, depending on the game's difficulty and length or on the player's skill, but they will not exhaust the possibilities the game has in this time or meet all of its challenges, and the full breadth of the endgame is probably not visible to them.
In the second phase, the player has likely mastered, or at least gotten a strong control of, the basics of the game. They have either won a run or two, if the game is short and approachable enough, or they are at least starting to think about how to do it, if the game is a little more challenging (or if it's a campaign). They are still probably discovering new things, unlocking new things, or seeing new things for the first time, but these are fewer and further between (again, depending on the game, of course). The focus on play is not so much learning the game but about honing that knowledge into a finer point, and about exploring every possibility that the game has. The full breadth of the game, which appeared limitless in the first few hours, is now becoming limited, as possibilities are seen to their fullest extent, and paths followed to their logical conclusion, and as the game starts to run out of newer and better ways to challenge the player. With each hour of play, runs become second nature, until they are eventually habitualized.
Around 50 hours, for most games, is when I think they start to hit their third and final phase. It may take longer than 50 hours, but around this point, a player starts to master the game, at least to the best of their ability. Their head is now bumping into the game's proverbial ceiling - all of the game's boundaries and possibilities are known to them. They are no longer experiencing new things, but rather, seeking out novel possibilities previously missed, or evaluating which possibilities are the strongest. They have likely won many runs by now, and are playing them under more challenging conditions; or, they have completed the campaign and are trying again on a higher difficulty; or they may even join a speedrunning community and branch their experience out further that way. The game no longer becomes something to experience and beat, but something to conquer in every possible way.
The basic gist of this is that good roguelikes remain fun after 10 hours;
great
roguelikes are still fun after 50. Of course, if you only play to play for 10, that might be fine for you, though great roguelikes are often great in the first 10 hours anyway. For a game to pass "the 50 hour test", as I call it, it has to really have layers of depth that continue to reveal themselves well after mastery is achieved - new possibilities to be sought and evaluated, every run creating new challenges never before seen. To me, a roguelike can
only
be revealed as truly spectacular after you have played it for this long, to find out if, when you bump your head on the ceiling, do you stop there, or does the ceiling unfold into something new?
The trick here is, reviewers, and many people who recommend a game early in its life, have often not yet pushed the game to its third phase. This is
not
meant to be gatekeeping, of course - if you play a game for 10 hours and it's fun and that's enough for you, that's all well and good! But it's my belief that a roguelike
must
be played for a certain amount of time to be able to evaluate it properly, to really test the boundaries of its depth - all roguelikes will seem deep at first, but only some truly are once you have explored them.
Loop Hero is a game that spectacularly fails the 50 hour test, and frankly, I don't think it passes the 10 hour test, either.
I played it for about 20-30 hours, because it's a campaign and it takes about that long to beat - and I have a friend who wanted to watch me so that spurned me on a bit. It's a pleasant looking game with a really good idea behind the mechanics, and I did want to see it through to see if the game would have any depth. If you play the game for a few hours and tinker around with it, it might seem pretty fun conceptually, but it really shows its limitations quickly. Frankly I don't think it even starts with much depth; the game has a lot of design problems and mechanically it's just not that very interesting to make decisions in, so the only thing that kept me going was the skinner box nature of it - that little adrenaline rush at finding new items and making meta-progress. I was starting to get a little bored of it after a few hours, but I pressed on in hopes that it would become more involved as I reached the endgame - nada. I beat the game feeling completely unsatisfied by anything I'd experienced.
But, for a few hours, it works well enough; and I suspect that this is a large part of the reason why it had glowing reviews but people have come down harder on it later. I've honestly found that almost none of my roguelike friends really found much enjoyment in it.