Releasing just in time for the Halloween season, Rogue Lords is joining the long list of turn-based indie roguelikes that task players with forging their own path through a world full of dangers. As the Devil, players will assemble a trio of famous evildoers from literature and folklore (such as Dracula, Bloody Mary and Lilith) and help them spread terror and corruption throughout the land. The game takes inspiration from the mechanics of Slay the Spire and gothic aesthetic of Darkest Dungeon -- but Rogue Lords has plenty to set it apart from those other games.
Outside of the obvious distinction of being the rare game that truly allows players to work on the side of darkness, Rogue Lords has a variety of unique mechanics and gameplay ideas that make it an experience like no other. But while these are generally fun and promising in their own right, the sheer number of ideas featured in Rogue Lords leave the overall package feeling quite bloated.
Rogue Lords' premise is pretty simple: you are the Devil and must exert your power over humanity and all that ails it after suffering a defeat against demon hunters. Players will build teams of three Disciples to take on each run, each of which has their own story, abilities and gameplay options. While the roster starts with just three, more characters unlock as the player levels up between runs or emerges victorious. Each run takes place on a randomly-generated map where players can choose which branching path to take determining what they'll encounter that night, whether that's combat, an event, healing, a shop or a surprise.
While not itself a card battler, Rogue Lords' combat will be somewhat familiar to Slay the Spire players. Each round, the player has a certain amount of energy available that each character's ability will draw from. Every character -- Disciple and foe -- has two separate health bars, one for Health Points and the other for Spiritual Points. These serve basically the same function, simply corresponding with different types of damage, but they add a new layer of strategy.
When either one of those bars reaches zero, rather than immediately dying, the character becomes Vulnerable. At the point, it will take just one hit of the same damage type to knock them out. This mechanic is one of the most inventive of the game, as it requires players to think about how they want to approach the fight and incentivizes keeping low powered, low energy cost moves. However, it can also lead to fights dragging on should that Vulnerable enemy unleash a powerful attack or heal their entire team before they can be taken out completely. Also frustrating is that each attack's damage is not fixed, but instead falls within a range, something that makes strategizing harder since you can't rely on a move doing as much damage as possible.
Softening this is the fact that (so long as they don't become Vulnerable and take another hit) Disciples' HP and SP doesn't really matter the way health does in other roguelikes. It actually resets after each battle. While automatic healing is generally unheard of within the genre, this is because the real health resource to keep up with is the player's overall Diabolic Essence -- which controls what is perhaps Rogue Lords most interesting mechanic.
While roguelikes have long been viewed as punishing games, sometimes to the point of feeling unfair, Rogue Lords actually lets players turn the tables by cheating the game rather than being cheated. By spending some of their essences, players can manipulate health bars, move around buffs and debuffs, change the odds during events and more. Disciples who are knocked out during battle will draw from the essence pool to stay alive, but this is costly -- and once your essence hits zero, the run is over.
This idea of cheating the game itself by manipulating nearly anything and everything is novel and fits perfectly into the game's overall vibe. After all, as an evil being who balks at human goodness and seeks to eradicate it in favor of terror and chaos, why should you have to play by the accepted rules? Unfortunately, the game also seems to rely on it a bit too much, as even early fights can be challenging, and it can be hard and tedious to get through them the normal way.
Between long individual fights with various mechanics and health bars to juggle, the various effects of terror or humanity rising against you, and the sheer number of nights it takes to reach the end of the story (should you survive that long, of course), Rogue Lords takes a long time to get through -- and that's not even taking into account the game's events. These involve the player's choice of Disciple encountering a situation that may help them spread fear or cause humanity to resist their devilish ways.
As with combat, players can spend essence to change the odds during events, and success or failure can bestow positive or negative traits. The Disciples not chosen will sometimes even react to their allies' actions, gaining traits of their own and bringing the party to life in a nice way. However, they still feel somewhat out of place. While Rogue Lords is laid out like a story, its writing is pretty generic in terms of horror tropes, and its events don't really add much. Combined with everything else (including the expected failures during early attempts), it'll likely take most players a long, long time to gain access to most of the characters, which require successful runs to unlock.
Rogue Lords has a lot of great ideas that really set it apart from similar games like Slay the Spire and fellow Nacon-published game Roguebook. However, the sheer number of things that need to be balanced during a run (combined with how long it takes to get through one at all) makes the difficulty curve hard to overcome.
While the game tries mitigate this by having its tutorial walk players through their first run, it often feels like Rogue Lords is trying to do too much and likely would have benefited from some brevity and simplicity. Still, as imperfect as it is, the game has a lot to offer fans of the genre, and it's especially fun to play this time of year.
Developed by Leikir Studio and Cyanide Studio and published by Nacon, Rogue Lords is available now on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. A review copy was provided by the publisher.