Gluttons for Punishment

So I won’t be the first person who admits to being somewhat of a machoist when it comes to difficult games.

From Dark Souls to Survival mode in Fallout 4, people seem to love playing with the deck stacked against them.

There’s just something super satisfying about defeating really hard enemies and getting amazing gear as a reward, there’s also that

Beautiful EXP you use to increase your stats or unlock perks.

Today I’m going to talk about two fantastic Indy games that love to bust your balls, but you always come back for the thrill.

There’s Rogue Legacy, and then There’s Hell Divers! Two totally different games when it comes to genre, but they share similarities

when it comes to kicking your teeth in while you grind yourself to greatness.

Rogue Legacy.

Well the name says it all, LITERALLY!

A Roguelike Platformer Developed by Cellar Door games in 2013.

The premise of the game is that you begin as a hero and progress as far as possible into a castle defeating enemies, collecting money and

Searching for bosses.

if the player dies, rather than restarting the game entirely, or from the last point where you died; the player arrives at a character selection screen

of Hero’s three randomly generated descendants. This loop occurs every time you die for the entirety of the game.

Each descendant is born with different character traits, some are fantastic like ADHD that increases the player’s movement speed, and awful ones

Like Alzheimer’s that removes the map from the game for the duration of playing as that character. For masochists like myself this is fantastic, after a

Certain point in the game you may actually enjoy the challenge of selecting the heir that has the worst traits to choose from because, well you’re crazy.


Another way the game likes to punish you is the castle lock-down system.

Because of the RNG nature of the game, the castle becomes randomly regenerated the same way your heirs do. However, the player is given the option

To “lock down” the castle by giving an NPC (The Architect) 40% of the gold you earn within the castle for that loop.

There’s also Charon, a phantom who stands at the castles drawbridge and charges you a toll. How much you ask? ALL OF YOUR GOLD!

That’s why players want to die as rarely as possible, and spend all of their gold on weapon, or character upgrades BEFORE you re-enter the castle.

After reaching the point where levelling up costs within the thousands; players are much less likely to lock-down a castle in favour for keeping their gold.

Rogue Likes, the genre you love to hate to love.

Now most of the time people love to play co-operative games, From team based challenges in battlefield, to 1 V.S. 1 bouts in Street fighter.

But what happens when not only the onscreen enemies can kill you; but your teammates, their equipment, and you, yes even YOU can kill

the character you play as? Well you get Helldivers! the most butt clenching co-op game this side of the Galaxy!

Helldivers was developed by Arrowhead Studios of Magicka fame, and released on March 3^rd 2015 exclusively for the PlayStation 3, the PlayStation 4,

and the PlayStation Vita. The game was later released on Steam in December losing its PlayStation exclusivity. The game is an isometric, co-op,

twin stick shooter, for up to 4 players online. You take control of a Helldiver, whose sole purpose is to spread managed democracy across the galaxy

and acquire resources for “SUPER EARTH”.

The game is very satirical and draws heavy inspiration from Aliens and Starship Troopers. Both of those films featured brutal over the top gore

and this is directly reflected in the game. The game is very unforgiving when it comes to friendly fire, and calling down “stratagems”. Stratagems

Are powerful; weapons, vehicles, and tools deployed from your command ship in orbit. The only problems are; not only can the pod you deploy,

Kill you, but you need to correctly input a long sequence of directional buttons like a phone number, or deployment code. If you make a

mistake however you need to re-enter the entire sequence. This can be quite frustrating, especially when there’s 15 enemies on screen,

two of your team-mates are dead and you need to call down both of them but your stratagem is on cool down.

So if it’s so punishing why play? Because you need dat gear. Just like Rogue Legacy you can upgrade your character with new weapons, armour (and
unlike Rogue Legacy) Stratagems.

The loot and level up grind on these punishing games is probably why people like me keep coming back.