Loot Rascals brightening up Steam on March 7th
Colourful wee loot rascals
Loot Rascals [official site] has been out for a little while, but in an Itch-only Refinery Edition for those who wanted to help test and balance the colourful card-collecting roguelike. Now that Refinery Edition has, presumably, been refined, and the finished game is making the leap to Steam on March 7th. It looks delightful, as you'll see below.
Here's the trailer from back in May, which explains the setup and shows the mechanics in turn.
As a Scot, I went to school with about 30 people who sounded a lot like the genie character. If he's got a glass bottle of Irn-Bru tucked up his sleeve and enjoys punching his friends in the baws then, yeah, I definitely know him.
Loot Rascals is about jogging across a procedural world, beating up monsters in order to gain the cards they drop, and then re-arranging those cards in order to customise your skills. There's also "steal-or-share" ambient multiplayer, where some of the cards you find will actually be those that once belonged to other real players. You can either send them back to them or decide to keep them for yourself, like a cheeky little space puncher.
It looks tight, but also as if its few systems are being delivered with a high degree of polish. That's because the art is partly by Dave Swatpaz, an animator who has worked on Adventure Time, and Brent Kobayashi who previously worked on Alphabear. The game is being developed by Hollow Ponds, the company co-founded by Ricky Haggett, who at his previous company Honeyslug made Hohokum.
Loot Rascals will cost $15 on Steam, and so probably around £12.