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If you like inventory tetris, check out the dungeon crawler Backpack HeroArrange your item grid for fiendish synergies in this rad roguelikelike
Arrange your item grid for fiendish synergies in this rad roguelikelike
Backpack Hero Early Access TrailerWatch on YouTube
Backpack Hero Early Access Trailer
The inventory tetris challenge isn’t making everything fit (you will abandon so many items), it’s making a good build fit. Some items buff other items they touch, or which are in the same row. Some armour pieces are strongest in certain areas of the grid (top for helmets, left and right for individual gloves, bottom for boots). Some items are ‘heavy’ and will always fall to the bottom row of your bag, while others are ‘light’ and only go at the top. Some items move around of their own volition, granting buffs along the way, so you need to clear a path for them. And then you encounter enemies who cast curses, which manifest as physical items demanding space in your pack until disposed of (or you can ignore them, and directly take a fair chunk of damage).
This build was a mess! I never found items I needed to pop off, but got too comfy and overconfident to pivot to something else
The buildcrafting can lead to pleasingly silly results. I’ve had builds which deleted bosses in three turns. I’ve had builds which made a flurry of zero-cost attacks that grew from gentle stabs to murderous woundings. In one run, I built a wall along the bottom of my backpack. Just a wall, built of bricks which individually offer a tiny amount of passive block each turn other but grow stronger the bigger your wall is. You can even put a roof on top for extra bonuses.
The best part is that because this is all so freeform, you can try pivoting to a new build mid-run if you find inspiration or an item that’s worth it. Get rid of your old gear, swap in new stuff, and away you go as a whole new adventurer.
Ienjoyed the Backpack Hero demoearlier this year, and I’m a touch overwhelmed now it’s in early access with new items, enemies, secrets, and more.
The biggest change is two extra characters who play in whole new ways. The frog wizard Tote adds a deckbuilding element, replacing many item types with a collection of magical runes she randomly draws from each turn. And the robomouse CR-8 has you arrange circuitry to send a surge of item-activating energy through your inventory in a line, a flow you can expand and redirect with pipes and splitters and boosters and… it’s a lot to get my head around. I’m not sure what I’m doing with either of these characters yet, and I look forward to learning.
The hope is for early access to last seven months, leading to a full launch in April 2023. Before then, the devs plan to add more characters, enemies, events, dungeons, and a town-building meta-progression system. You can see that and more laid out onthe roadmap.
Backpack Hero is available nowon Steam Early Accessfor Windows, Mac, and Linux. The 10% launch discount brings it down to £12.14/€12.59/$15.29 until Monday the 22nd. You can download a demo from Steam or play it in your browseron Itch.io.
Inventory tetris fans might also fancythis puzzle game which is basically Resident Evil 4’s inventory. And along our ongoing mission to decide the single best thing in video games, you decided thatinventory tetris is better than fishing minigames.
