It’s almost pathologic for players to achieve organization and structure in video games where they’re asked to build, maintain, and proliferate. Loop Hero scratches that itch and more.
Loop Hero
Developer: Four Quarters
Price: $15
Platform: PC
MonsterVine was supplied with a Steam code for review
Spend any time on my island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and you’ll quickly get a sense of order. Fruit trees are aligned in tidy rows at the north end of my isle. To the east are my flowers, arranged in perfect 5-by-5 patches and coordinated by color. Like a kid’s segregated dinner plate, the flora promise never to invade one another to preserve my rigid idea of neatness. It’s unnatural and manufactured, but I’m hardly alone in this.
This was the mindset I found myself in the earliest hours of Loop Hero. The rock and meadow tiles I had gathered looked clean in their separate regions on Loop Hero’s gridded world; the peas never touching the carrots. As I laid a ninth rock in the center of a geometrically pleasing 3-by-3 stony patch, the graticules between the rocks disappeared and formed a mountain peak. The much larger tile granted a greater boost to the overall health of the nameless hero vacantly wandering this artificial world, and every two days it spawned a harpy that would glide down and fight the hero. Laying the tenth rock brought goblins. As the land became fuller, the mountains converged with the meadow, changing those tiles neighboring it into blooming meadows, healing hero one more point over its non-blooming relatives.
Loop Hero, developed by Four Quarters and released on PC earlier this month, is brimming with interactions like these. There are consequences for how you build inside the void representing its forgotten world, many of which are unknown until you’ve experimented a bit. Those stated above are just the simpler interactions I learned my first time loading the game, and I discovered so much more in the 56 hours that followed. Loop Hero is a drip-feed of discovery and nuance, which largely accounts for how deceptively addicting it is. To top it off, lurking in the background is a deeply compelling metatext about the dubious narratives developers weave to preserve the core gameplay loop. 
“Loop” is the keyword here. Nearly every mechanism in Loop Hero is operating on repeat. Every run starts with the hero popping into a world that is nothing more than a misshapen running track. Everything else is void, a state of cosmic nothingness forced onto Loop Hero’s world by the Lich. Knowing not what to do, the hero walks the track until they’re defeated in combat or they’ve retreated to camp. Enemies spawn at regular intervals. Other things appear after the hero has completed a loop. Attacks, regardless of source, are also on a cycle. As such, most of the action in Loop Hero is automatic. The player has no direct control over the hero’s trajectory or how they fight. As an RPG, you choose the hero’s class and attire, which have their own consequences in battle, but for the most part, the player and the hero are detached.
The bulk of Loop Hero’s player interaction comes from its deck builder characteristics. When the hero slays a monster in auto-battle, the monster has a chance to drop a card representing architecture or landscapes. The cards can then be played as tiles on the grid to give the hero or environment bonuses. As I mentioned earlier, cards like the meadow and rock give the hero greater health regeneration and endurance. Other cards, like the vampire mansion, spawn creatures that can in turn drop more cards or gear. This aspect of Loop Hero is much like a management simulator. You’ll want to be keeping an eye on which tiles are spawning what and where, as too many strong enemies on any given tile will quickly overwhelm the hero. Loop Hero can be paused anytime outside of battle to plan and drop your tiles, alleviating a lot of the anxiety that comes with management-type games. Depending on how many enemies are spawning daily on a run, however, can easily make this point moot. Building a world that generated a manageable number of strong enemies, mooks, and resources was by far the best and most satisfying part of Loop Hero.
At the end of a cycle, when the hero has retreated, lost, or defeated a chapter boss, they return to camp to craft new additions, like a kitchen or library, that unlock new classes or starting items. A lot of these renovations come slowly, and players will usually have to go on multiple runs before they see any real progress. Expanding the camp brings Loop Hero to a grinding halt, and it often seemed like I had reached a plateau, leaving me stuck on a chapter without any promise of seeing a powerful upgrade any time soon. I don’t think this part of the game needs to be removed, but perhaps it could be reworked to have lower resource costs. It made an overall easy in-and-out experience more of a slog than necessary.
There are also times when Loop Hero can be too ambiguous. In the game’s second chapter, I finally unlocked the part of the camp that allows you to craft food and items to enhance the hero before a run. But it was sometimes unclear what certain items were doing, like the cheese slice, which gives the hero “+1 HP after killing an enemy.” This wording is similar to the rock and mountain tiles in the game, so I assumed it meant that one hp was being added to the hero’s overall health pool. However, it was actually just healing the hero for one hp despite not matching the syntax of other healing effects. I also unlocked the ability to give food and items to the hero’s fellow campers, but I never figured out what this did in the game.
Loop Hero is exactly the sort of game that its publisher, Devolver Digital, has developed an eye for. It’s addictive, genre-spanning gameplay on top of a nebulous story that is open to interpretation. Side characters are sometimes too dismissive of what’s going on in the world and players will probably dip in and out of runs with so much fervor and anticipation that they won’t stop to examine the overall metatext. Loop Hero pokes fun at the grind players pursue to satisfy a game’s core loop. Rarely do we question why we do the tasks a game asks of us, but Loop Hero puts those questions front and center when the hero asks why they’re going down an endless road and whether their actions have any meaning. This idea is so much at the front of my mind when I play that I have to wonder if Loop Hero’s own shallow narrative logic is ironic.
The Final Word
Loop Hero is an addictive and complex game that changes what it means to be on the grind. A few ambiguities hinder the experience, but that doesn’t stop it from being an overall innovative and fantastic game.
– MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good
