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[Roguebook] It's like Slay the Spire with two playable heroes at once.
MNC Dover
Full-time Voice ActorKirkland, WARegistered User regular
Full-time Voice ActorKirkland, WARegistered User regular
https://youtu.be/dGOX85g6Td8The Story
You are trapped in the Book of Lore of Faeria, and each page represents a new challenge. Put together the best synergies between cards, talents and treasures, and take on the Roguebook.
https://youtu.be/dJUw8gdP_6YRoguebook is a Slay the Spire style game where you choose 2 out of 4 heroes to pair up and face multiple levels filled with fights and bosses. If you've played StS, you should feel quite at home with the battles. A big difference is managing two heroes and swapping their positions during combat, as only the front hero gets targeted by enemies. As an added bonus, you can find Ally cards which grant persistent bonuses when played in combat.
A big difference is Roguebook is how it handles the map. Instead of predestined paths to take, you use ink to reveal hexes on the map. Doing this will help you to find treasures, events, and more battles. Managing your ink usage is as important as gathering up Relics and extra cards. There is shopkeeper on the map who you can always visit whenever you want.
The more you play, the more stuff you unlock. There are extra cards, abilities, and tech trees to max out in order to complete the 20 levels of difficulty (aka Ascensions).
I'll update the OP with more info as I go.
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Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051
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edit: Oh also, after posting my impressions I played another couple runs. The last one ended with me dying to the Act III boss.
The enemy design is very good. Both in art and mechanics. The act 3 boss I fought had a special mechanic that made my cards cost more but also gave me a card in my hand that could be used to get energy to cast. So it was a very well designed risk/reward on when and how to work with them. Sadly, I lost.
A solid addition to the list of roguelites.
Still haven't pulled the trigger because while a lot of this sounds good, the between-run skill tree looks miserable? Games like this are supposed to be about gaining a better understanding of the enemies you face and the interactions you can bring to bear, so having a full on "just buy some improvements" skill tree strapped on the side looks like an insanely strange thing to attach?
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
It helps by the skill tree being things that aren't just straight up "do things better" power increases (mostly)
I've done 4-5 runs (iirc); there is no history tab that I can see, which is kinda annoying now that I see there isn't one. But anyway, I've unlocked at least 1 rank of 8 talents in that time. I've got:
I do like that the early tiers are mostly all "add things to the chapter maps."
What I don't like is that there's no ability to remove items from the Embellishments tree once slotted. That'd be nice.
To frame the last comment a bit more broadly; that's the problem I'm having with Roguebook: 90% of the mechanics and feel are very nice. But then there's a minor grip from the implementation. Like, why is there no ability to remove set embellishments and regain the currency? What purpose does locking the player into an accidental misclick serve? Sure, I can go on more runs and then unlock the ones I wanted but the feel isn't superb. Same as for why there's no run history.
Also, I've run into a few bugs. About 2 that I've noticed but one of those caused a crash. The other is a UI bug that showed the 4th character before I've even seen them. (Which I suspect might be more because I'd just paid a few more skill tree unlocks and that could be the appearance trigger for them? IDK, will see on a new run.
One of the developers was in the chat and mentioned that the metaprogression was designed mostly with the intent of leveling you up alongside the... whatever their version of ascension levels are, not as something you should need to grind just to make it through the base difficulty.
Rogue Legacy was a game where grinding out the stat points you need to make the game winnable was literally the only thing you did. It was completely unreasonable to attempt late-game areas underleveled. So that game doesn't even meet the loosest definition of "roguelike" to me.
But then Hades has the Mirror of Darkness upgrades and it's not nearly as bad. You do a couple of warm-up runs to get enough currency to unlock multiple dash charges and maybe a couple cheap ranks of max HP and you're basically good to start trying for wins in earnest; the rest is pretty minor. Well, Death Defiance ranks are very powerful, but I made a personal challenge of getting my first win with zero Death Defiance and did it in a reasonable timeframe. It's not hard to imagine a really good player winning with no upgrades at all; it's mostly just the dodge skill that feels like a real killer to not have.
However, the rat dude seems significantly better than every other hero. That is my only major gripe so far.
So, here's my question about Rougebook before i pull the trigger on it:
How much does it allow for crazy bullshit like StS... vs how much does it rely on you achieving crazy bullshit? Because you can scrape through the with scrappiest of scrappy decks in StS even on the hardest diffuclty through a combo of skill and a little bit of luck. While Monster Train felt like it really relied on you achieving bullshit, patirucrly at the highest levels.
second to that: How do it's ascension levels affect things? StS has the best implementation i've seen, i hated Hades pick your own poison approach, and Monster Train had a lot of "We kept inflating the size of your deck!" which was just Not Fun.
...Third question: Does it have any stupid behind the scenes draw mechanics like Monster Train did? (Which did real dumb thins with how and when you drew units and arahsghsgs i still hate them for that)
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Having played through one run and getting to the skill tree, this post is entirely incorrect. Firstly, adding extra stuff to the map is effectively a straight up power bonus because everything that you add is somehow good and while you may not innately start with these things baked into your deck/characters, you're increasing the likelihood of finding any of them as you go. Secondly, there are absolutely a bunch of these things that are straight upgrades. Start each run with a random treasure - Start each run with more gold - Character max health increases - Replace cards in your starting deck ... just from what I can see after one run.
At any rate, game feels alright. Achievements are bugged because sadly I did not beat the avatar of greed on my first run :P (honestly, that seems borderline impossible to do without having unlocked Faeria Wells from the progression tree?). Will happily play some more and see about answering some of those questions, @The Zombie Penguin~
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
Very cool of you to call me wrong on what feels to me are differences of description and framing.
"do things better" was a purposeful choice of words. I meant that there's no "Gain +5 Power" (*that I have seen) or similiar in the Embellishment tree. To me and in the framing I was adopting in my earlier post: adding things to the map increases your potential power, it does not give it to you for nothing (as you've still got to find/reach them on the chapter map). Which is all that I was trying to get across.
I see what you are meaning with the treasures one, that is a power increase over not having it, absolutely agree. I will point out that it's is a few levels down the tree, so it isn't something that the player can nab the first or second run. It also does add an extra point of variance into a player's plan at the start of a run, which I think is better and more interesting over just making the player straight better at whatever they would do regardless. Replace cards in the starting deck I'd say feel similiar.
The +gold and +health do fall into a "be better" improvement, that's true. The gold specifically will give the player a sharper power increase if it's enough extra gold to buy more things from the shop at Act 1 to start.
Anyway, got another run under my belt. This one was a victory over the Avatar of Greed with Sharra and Sorocco. And that unlocks the Epilogue system aka the game's version of ascension levels. It's a series of selectable challenges that the player can choose to mix and match. The challenges are split into three different trees (somebody likes trees on the game dev team methinks) Wealth, Exploration, and Heroism. To unlock later items in each tree, the player has to have a win with the prior one/ones active. The cumulative total of the activated epilogues seem to determine the total difficulty level and is set at 1-15 (or 0 with none selected.) The spoiler below has a screenshot of the epilogue screen for visual reference.
I still don't understand why the game doesn't have a Victory screen with deck and treasures or a Run History logbook. I really wish it did.
The higher the ascension (epilogue level in this game), the more it feels like you need a gimmick card or combo or setup of some sort - to me it feels closer to monster train than slay
Their ascension level (epilogue) are actually like a little bit of a mix of both hades and slay - there are three columns of stuff to pick from each of them has a point value of 1 to 5 - so to do epilogue 1 (and you have to do them 1 to 15, no skipping) - you pick one of the first three, and for epilogue 2, you can pick two level 1s or the level 2 you just unlocked, etc etc. Basically they want you to try all the epilogues once, and for some of them, i will never go back to them, since they can be very annoying, but at the top level, epilogue 15, you have to choose the 3 5 point epilogues. You can only pick one thing per track. So eventually you just end up with the same run modifiers if you are trying to do the 'max level' content.
It doesn't mess with draw the way monster train does.
Sidenote since you didn't ask, but might care - this game RARELY offers removal - I think i've seen one random event pop up a couple times where I could pay to remove a card, but in general they are much bigger on inflating your deck (theres a hero/party based talent tree based on how many cards are in your deck - every 4 cards you increase, you get a somewhat random choice of 3 talents beneficial to one of the party members, or something slightly more generic that might benefit the party overall (or the exploration). You will be able to get rid of some of the basic strikes and defends on the meta prog tree, but they just replace it with random stuff (offensive cards for strikes and defensive cards for defends). Basically, they heavily push you towards owning that thick deck life. Card transmutes are way more common, though, if you can manage to find them on your map.
Relics are about the same as all the other games, some nice to have, some incredibly OP - I think they might skew a little bit weaker than the other games, but not by much.
The gem slots on cards, to me, are what make this game good/powerful/interesting - cards can have one or two gem slots (raaaaandoooooom) - and basically they run the entire gamut of what you would see in monster train from the real cheap card upgrades, to (I think) beyond the real powerful spell upgrades you could get within the divine temples or whatever they were called. Rare/Epic/Legendary gems are frequently insane power boosts. This is where a TON of your power will end up being located.
If you do end up playing it, I'll be interested to see what you think of the exploration system - there is a lot of luck influencing that (you can't see random events, you can't see faeria wells, you can't see anything other than enemies and, eventually, a couple of the relics) - I know that I feel much weaker if I can't find 3 faeria wells - that is such a huge power increase.
I dunno, those are my initial thoughts - I'm E10 without many issues, I've unlocked all the cards, and all the relics/gems from their natural progression system. I'll probably get thru 15, but I don't know where it would land in the list - I think I still prefer sts and monster train more, but it could just be familiarity.
So let's celebrate by all going out and buying the same burger. -transmet
The longevity really depends on new content. There's a great framework here that could expand exponentially.
But there's enough in there that makes me raise my eyebrows that i'm not really willing to drop 30 NZD on it,not when i've got plenty of other games to play (and StS is still entertaiing me thousands of hours later...)
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For what it's worth, I disagree with the criticisms raised. The game is very young compared to StS and the history of tweaks/changes makes me optimistic about the developer's ability to make necessary adjustments.
It's well worth the money. I rate Roguebook above Monster Train, mostly because Monster Train hasn't appreciably changed or evolved since launch, imho.
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
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Monster Train's DLC was generally a good shot in the arm. I'd like to see them double down on the Monster-fusing mechanic with any future game, as i think that's where the game is strongest (It's TD elements, and creating new units by merging existing ones togther)
@MNC Dover for me it's frustrating in that a lot of these StS alikes seem to be regressive compared to StS. You shouldn't try and be StS, obviously - that's dumb, StS exists and is basically perfect. But you should learn from the stuff that StS does well, and why it does it well.
Like Ascensions being fixed, and no long term progression. these go hand in hand! Ascensions being fixed means the game is capable of being balanced around a fixed difficulty level. This is a good thing as a developer. (IIRC from convos with the StS devs, the game is roughly balanced around A10~A15 difficulty, and A15+ is not balanced for with the acknowledgement that it's actively unfair. I think the devs have even said they think the Heart's kind of dumb on A20 - i dont agree, it's a pretty fair fight, but hey!)
No Long term progression ties into that - there's a concrete power floor that everyone starts on, and all balance decisions can be made off. There's just a bunch of really clever, tight decision making in StS you could and should learn from instead of trying to reinvent a crappier wheel.
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Frankly, this is still an early access game, and I can understand people being outraged at Day-1 DLC because that's bad comedy. There are absolutely good bits to this game, but I'm not particularly enjoying playing it at the moment and mostly continue to do so as an academic exercise.
(My long post also had notes about how StS came out very rough and needed a lot of time in the tumbler before we got the gem it has since become. This game has incredible promise but is going to need some work if it plans to hang around at all and do more than try and buy players back with DLC)
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
Or are you talking about the hero skins and alt card art bits? Or was it whatever the "Apex Predator pack" that I can see is the topic of one of the dev's news posts back on June 21. If so, I'm lacking details on pricing or content in that dlc. Except what was put into the news about them pulling back and putting that dlc content into the base game and working with Steam to make sure anyone that purchased the Apex could get a refund.
I did look just slightly askance at the skins. Mostly because I don't see a reason in a game like this. But also, (in the current state of games that have dlc day one) $5 usd doesn't seem completely unreasonable for 4 cosmetic items though it is a bit on the high end of the scale.
Trying to feel it out better to be more specific and see what aspects stick. A lot of this has to do with the lack of polish I keep mentioning, and that this leads to a slower gameplay experience. You probably fight half as many enemies in this game as a run of Slay the Spire, but it takes 2x or 3x as long to play a run? And part of that is just because of really weird shit like the way animations and effects have to play out. Things like relics are a relatively small pool, but also have a lot of over-specialization ... And I really cannot understate how much I dislike this skill tree being part of a game like this. I get that it's a way to make "every run feel like progress" even when people are losing, but I'm over here wondering what point the game has been balanced against when you have stuff like the capacity to increase the health of every character by 50%+.
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
This game seems quite polished to me, tbh, more so than StS in many ways. It's good!
Ultimately I don't like this style of fat deck design as much as I like tuning a deck like StS, though.
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
Compartive to a lot of games, StS's unlocks come very fast and are more a complexity gate mechanism. I'm fairly sure you can have the game fully unlocked within 5 hours or less. Maybe more, it really depends how fast you play/how good you are starting out. But it's a very shallow power curve, and any gains are countered by the fact you also dilute the relic and card pool by unlocking things.
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- Play card for Hero A
- Play Sorocco card that adds Headbangs (Combo) to your hand
- Headbangs appear at 0 cost while they animate in, then update correctly to 1 cost after they land
I'm having a nice time at 10 hours in! I just got my first win, I've used Pages to add a lot of Things to the Map. I think the enemies in each chapter are very cute and pose a nice variety of problems.
The Apex Predator Pack was actual content - it was a new card for each hero, a new hard random end game event (with a really good reward), and like ~8 relics/artifacts - ranging from whatever to insanely good. It was a very good call on their part to roll it into the base game.
So let's celebrate by all going out and buying the same burger. -transmet
Oh god. Yes. 100% agree. Thank you for the explanation of the content.
Arctic, thanks a ton for the impressions. Honestly, I agree with the full list. I only quoted but snipped your list because that last one is my biggest beef with the game. The combat animations being clunky is slightly frustrating, but I can deal. Same with visual effect resolve order, it's clunky and pads a runtime, but not a deal breaker.
But not having a game end summary or history of summaries is downright inexcusable. Like, it actually led to me feeling less excitement on the first act 3 victory because of it. Just getting a sterile "Victory" screen and then dumped back to the main start screen was very quick and a little bit of a letdown over a victory screen from STS or Monster Train.
I also accept that most of what I have to say at this point is probably better directed at a discord server or something than spewed into our fledgling community here, but I appreciate being given the space to sort out some of my feelings about the game~
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
I totally get the complaints and share most of them. Maybe they just don’t bother me that much, given how much room to grow there is? StS was a much smaller, cruder game when I first fired it up, but is now in the pantheons. Roguebook could do the same with some tlc.
Plus, I tend to cycle through games as they unlock new content (for example, gunfire reborn got a new hero so I’ve put hours back into that but will prob move on to something else next week until there’s more new content).
Hopefully, roguebook will have similar content cycles to keep bringing me back.
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
Getting two of his allies that gained spirit and gave +1 energy when a hero took damage was even more silly. Act 3 boss was Avatar of Greed (the only one I've seen so far) but it didn't even matter. Took the thing down pretty quick. Also unlocked the 4th hero, who I think I like a lot. Has a very Simic (MTG colors Green/Blue) vibe.
Still liking the game, but the load times per battle are kinda silly. 2-5 seconds and they feel long.
I can say that the 4th hero can be unlocked after beating act 3 once and making it back to act 3, there's an event on the map and a treasure. Getting the treasure and giving it up completes the event and unlocks the hero.
For sure. He healed +7 at the end of each battle just straight between a treasure and a talent. I also got a 10 spirit ally (5 normally, but it has 10 when enraged :biggrin:) that healed when killed (and it also triggers at the end of a battle?! I get the logic for that but it makes it utterly broken.) That and Absorb Soul and Seifer would regularly sit at half or even full. Also, getting cards that hit for 30+ was just stupid.
So let's celebrate by all going out and buying the same burger. -transmet
Agree. Either it needs nerfed or the other upgrades for other heroes need buffed. The "lose three health" is way too lenient if every card is now enraged.
it's a super ridiculous power increase with even a single Absorb Soul and snowballs horribly with each additional source of healing.
So let's celebrate by all going out and buying the same burger. -transmet
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?