Chaos spreads through the polluted land. Evil imposes its will at every turn. Other plot stuff happens, but we don’t pay attention because it’s all beside the point. We are here to kill some stuff, explore, and find some wicked loot.
We are your heroes. We are a hobo, a monk, and a drug-herbalist we think may have been a lawyer in a different life. For several hours, we have scoured this countryside for dungeons to pillage and find batshit monsters to stab in the face. On the second floor of this cave, we are…dead. We died. The hobo was probably a bad idea.
Let’s start it over again.
Okay, so we still have the monk. He’ll do the healing but also provides a good amount of muscle. This time we’ll have a hunter and a scholar. That’s a good balance. And maybe we’ll heed the warning that says, “Hey, this dungeon isn’t great for your current player level.” We’d been doing so well that we did get a little cocky, so that’s our bad.
And we did pick a bunch of lore during that last run, which we can use to unlock some better gear and player classes, but also more locations and random encounters to help us along the way. So let’s spend all that shit right now and give this another shot.
I think we should stick with the same adventure. Although, we have a bunch here, so maybe it would be fun to try one we haven’t yet. Yeah, let’s pick the ice world that will slowly kill us every second we are outside of shelter. I know, on paper, that doesn’t sound rad, but who cares. This game isn’t about doing what’s easiest. It’s about testing the limits of survival, probably failing, and then having back at it again.
That’s the nature of roguelikes, sure, but that’s also the nature of the tabletop games from which For the King developer IronOak takes inspiration.
A game like this isn’t unfair, but it’s also not doing us any favors if we mess up or don’t plan accordingly.
If we neglect the rising chaos in the kingdom (a difficulty multiplier that grows if left unchecked), the map will become nearly impossible to safely navigate and the enemies too hard. If we let the bosses known as scourges go unkilled, they’ll fuck with us during our adventures, halting progress and possibly killing us. If we don’t keep our life pool up, it’ll run out. If we don’t complete quests for better gear, enemies will overpower us.
That’s one of the coolest things about our quests together. I like how we have to juggle multiple objectives at once to survive. Other than the overworld, which is laid out exactly like familiar hexatile tabletop games, this is what reminds me most of strategy board games. We have a lot of balls in the air and a lot of ways to get to the final dungeon, and none of the choices are easy.
Oh wow. I thought that boss was going to be hard, but your elemental damage combo’d nicely into my character’s critical hit (with bleeding damage!). Good thing our scholar was able to knock off this boss’ protection spell. But that’s kind of the deal here. Smart decisions may have unlucky outcomes in individual battles (as any Risk player can relate), but over the course of a game, we’ll have spectacular runs that absolutely wreck bosses.
And here is the final dungeon – less of a dungeon than it is a spire creeping along a mount that we must climb seemingly endlessly until our life pool is nearly spent, our resources nearly gone and some hell-ice-creature sits before us, ready to slap us around. This is going to be tense.
Let me just say, since we’re probably going to die right here, I’ve been on adventures alone, controlling three character parties all by my lonesome. It was still addicting. I liked the kill-loot-go-repeat loot loop just fine. I liked that this game has pretty much endless replay and each adventure is pretty bite-sized compared to other RPGs. That’s all cool, but it’s twice as fun playing it with you.
If we had a third friend to play with us who we didn’t hate, it would probably be three times as fun? One person controlling each character? Seems cool. And that person wouldn’t even need to be physically here with us since there’s online co-op in addition to this local game.
I’m sorry if I’m getting a little emotional here, sentimental. I just don’t know if I would love this game as much if I weren’t playing it with you. I needed you to know that before we do this shit.
Okay, let’s kill this asshole. And if we fail, no big deal. We’ll start again.