Later on you can spend a good deal of gold to allow yourself to keep up to 50% of what you earn. The gatekeeper Charon initially takes ALL of your remaining gold, which puts a strong emphasis on spending your gold as efficiently and completely as possible before renewing your explorations. However, before your eyes turn into dollar signs, bear in mind that every time you die and start over on a new character, you have to pay a toll to re-enter the castle. Nearly all progression within the game is gated by and funded with gold. To continue the Castlevania homage, many of the background items are breakable, and break them you should! It’s a great way to start amassing gold coins.
The spells feel very familiar for fans of the Castlevania series, right down to including throwing knives or tossing an axe in a high arch. Others are purely flavor, such as “The One” which changes the load screen’s text to “Jacking In” and replaces some of the background textures with a more high-tech visual style.Įach character has the expected equipment of weapon and armor, as well as one or more spells, and eventually you’ll unlock per-class special abilities as well. Many of these are quite tongue-in-cheek, ranging from “ADHD” which grants a speed boost to movement, to vision conditions that affect the game’s actual display like “Far-sighted”, to the gut-wrenching “Vertigo” which inverts the entire game screen vertically.
New heroes belong to one of a series of unlockable classes, which drastically affect their play style, and may have a series of keywords or “affixes” that alter the current experience further. Mysterious journal entries give some semblance of an overarching story and motivation to progress. No explanation is given for how every single hero has managed to produce offspring before beginning his or her adventures, nor does anyone know why the children follow their forebears’ lead like lemmings into the sea. When the player is defeated, which will become a familiar experience in short order, the next generation of hero is chosen from a panel of three randomly-generated descendents of the deceased. Rogue Legacy stars an unending series of heroes exploring a randomly-generated castle filled with monsters, bosses, and loot.