When we heard at our morning meeting that a new roguelike, Let’s!, was about to be released, Revolution! It was “something like Minesweeper and Into the Bleach combined,” so I immediately went to the Steam store and bought it. Download demo. What a pleasure to know that it is comparable to the comparison.
Challenged to defeat the “Rotten King” in a colorful fantasy world, the game casts players as warriors who move tile by tile on an unexplored board. Wilderness tiles are numbered to indicate the number of adjacent roads. Roads are hiding places for enemies, and when you enter them you will be attacked, and they will attack you further.
The trick is to figure out where you think the roads are and launch attacks into unexplored spaces, revealing them at the same time and blowing up any enemies hiding there. However, the stamina available for these attacks is very limited and can only be recovered by further exploration, so you must choose your moments very carefully.
The experience captures Minesweeper’s wonderful tension—in-depth puzzle solving combined with the need to bet on uncertainty at key moments—and gives it a more organic feel. Numbers are the most specific information about where a road is, but roads also have their own visual logic. If a tile leads to an unexplored location, that tile must also be a road or dead end, and you can: Guess with a little more confidence. And the array of abilities and upgrades you earn while running will aid your quest and transform your overall strategy. A spear piercing multiple tiles in a row led to a completely different way of mapping the board compared to his AOE swing against all the surrounding tiles where I started first.
However, the Evil King also has tricks of his own. As you progress from board to board, your enemies become more and more terrifying. Even the cynical aristocrats who blow their horns and spot other enemies as soon as you reach and defeat them, draining your stamina. Their presence makes you even more unable to fight back. When one of these villains is spotted and not easily attacked, suddenly your every move counts. After 6 turns, that bomb minion is going to explode, but it’s 8 squares away from me. Is there a way to make it explode in time?
As with Into the Breach, you’ll always have perfect information about the enemies you spot, turning combat into a complex puzzle as well as a tactical challenge. And how fascinating it is to combine that approach to combat with significant exploration. no Find the best route across a world of hidden dangers where you are not always sure of your location with perfect information.
I’m already hooked. It only takes about 30 minutes to complete, making it a great lunchtime strategy. If that bothers you, check out the demo now. The demo will disappear at the end of Steam NextFest on June 26th.
