You break it, you bought it
Developer Heart Machine
Publisher Gearbox Publishing
Format PC
Origin US
Release Summer (early access)
Given that one wrong move can potentially mean having to start the whole thing again, lending tension to every enemy encounter, Roguelikes are among the most high-pressure games you can play. Throw in time constraints and that tension heightens further. And when you’re sharing your screen with a game’s director, as we are here with Heart Machine’s Alx Preston silently observing our every mistake, well, that’s a new level of pressure entirely.
Our session begins gently enough, with our nimble, blue-haired Breaker warping from a peaceful (read: empty) floating city hub down to the more verdant but hostile Overgrowth below. The generic slimes we bat away with our sword quickly give way to more challenging feral beasts jumping in to take a swipe at us. Our attempt to make a run for it, with the help of a hoverboard activated by clicking in the left stick while sprinting, only lands us in an ambush: waiting on a slope in front of us is a new enemy type that fires laser beams. We’re soon overwhelmed by these, our Breaker collapsing to the ground. And so we begin again.
This time, we try a more cautious approach, using our laser rifle to pick off some enemies early. But as in Hyper Light Drifter a meter prevents us from relying on this; defeat enemies with melee attacks and one may just drop an energy pod to refill it. We find ourselves defending more, a perfectly timed guard stunning an enemy long enough for a critical punish. These are still just the grunts, though; our real targets are three much larger, ‘elite’ enemies marked on our minimap. The goal is to eliminate all three in order to open the gate leading to the boss – or ‘crown’, in the game’s terminology. That’s the plan, anyway, until the first elite we reach one-shots us before we even realise what’s happened.
That’s the plan, until the first elite one-shots us before we even realise what’s happened
Nonetheless, during our attempts it occurs to us that this Overgrowth hasn’t shifted in structure or layout, and not only because it’s a curated demo. Breaker is, after all, not a traditional Roguelike but rather a “hybridisation”, as Preston puts it. You may start from scratch for each run (for this build, we have preset loadouts to choose from, such as a heavy combo of greatsword and shotgun), but the world persists for a set number of runs. “If you don’t beat it within the amount of runs that you’re given, then you’ll fail and we’ll reroll your world for you,” he says. Not having to reroll each time makes sense f
