Earlier this month,I spoke to the developers of SpellRogueand had a chance to play the game’s demo. They were later kind enough to send me a key for the Early Access version shortly after it launched, and the next day or so of my life vanished in a blur of D6s.
The demo showcased a well thought-out turn-based roguelike with a fun, intuitive, roll-and-assign dice pool mechanic. What wasn’t apparent, though, was the depth of spells, options, and builds available to players in the full game.
Its addition of Hazel and Azar, the two other playable characters besides Lapis, allows for completely different styles of play. Hazel is all about raw strength, while Azar prefers a death-by-a-thousand cuts approach. On top of that, all three characters can unlock up to four unique starting loadouts.
The best part of games like SpellRogue is the challenge of creating a viable build using only what you find along the way. I’ve played perhaps a dozen or so runs, and had a different build for each of them. Not all of them worked, of course, but some came close - including one heartbreaking Hailstorm build for Lapis that used repeated rerolls to charge up an attack before letting loose, only to come one turn short of defeating Arkanax, the final boss.
As much as I’d like to say that my first victory came from a clever combo build, it was with a brute-force Hazel deck that I first pulled out a win. Stacking damage buffs and then doubling them to reach critical mass, I learned the first important lesson of SpellRogue; go big or go home. It’s much better to go all-in on a mechanic that you can exploit ad nauseum, since you need some impressive damage numbers to beat Arkanax.
Despite having dabbled with Hazel and Azar, Lapis is still my favorite character to play. He doesn’t have as much control over his dice pool as the others, but I’m having a blast with his poison builds. My only other win thus far - and on a higher difficulty, no less - came by turtling up and punishing attackers with poison stacks, then letting the damage-over-time do its job or converting the stacks into a single attack.
Developers Thorbjørn Nielsen and Tim Løye Skafte cited 2020 indie hit Monster Train and 2021’s Roguebook - the latter of which was designed byMagic: The Gatheringcreator Richard Garfield - as SpellRogue’s chief influences, and it shows. While SpellRogue might not have the visual wow-factor of those games, it nails the depth of gameplay and replayability that will keep players saying, “what the heck, one more run.”
Using dice rather than cards is a nice change of pace in the roguelike space as well; coming from a tabletop background that includes more RPGs and wargames, I’m personally much more comfortable with dice probabilities than cards.
During a break from my dice-rolling marathon, I noticed that Guidelight Games had added an Early Access roadmap to the Steam page. I’d almost forgotten that SpellRogue was in Early Access. It certainly feels complete, in the same way thatDune: Spice Warsdid last year; when we get the full version and look back, we’ll see how far it came.
The roadmap promises more of just about everything; spells, rituals, dice enchants, buffs - you name it. I’m amazed at all the ways that the devs have come up with to implement the simple six-sided die into their game, and even more amazed that they aren’t done yet.
One part of SpellRogue that still feels beta-ish is the encounter variety. After visiting each of the three biomes (the forest, the desert, and the void), it’s pretty easy to anticipate which enemies you’ll face. While this allows for better planning, since an experienced player will know which fights their build could struggle against and plan contingencies, I can see the game getting stale after the zillionth Chaos Angel miniboss or Faerie Essence event long before players run out of fun builds to try.
That aside, SpellRogue has gone from being a cool roguelike with some fun ideas to one of my favorite games thus far in 2024. I can’t wait to see what’s next, or what I’ll brew up for future runs.
