Loot Rascals Is A Card-Capturing Retro Sci-Fi Roguelike
Hologram hell
Loot Rascals [official site] is a freshly announced roguelikelike strategy affair from Hollow Ponds. It's got card collection and deck-building elements, robots, space travel, permadeath, a Scottish hologram character, and is wrapped up in a lovely-looking Jetsons-esque retro sci-fi aesthetic.
It's not due until next year, but it looks pretty special already. See:
Looks darn nice, I'm sure you'll agree. So what's it all about, then? Well, after unexpectedly crash landing on a foreign planet, you're met with a bunch of peculiar automatons and whimsical monsters who want nothing more but for you to bugger off back where you came from. Thing is, your ship's wrecked, so it's time to crack some skulls in turn-based bouts, gather some ability-enabling cards, and survive the procedurally-generated alien landscape.
But there's a catch: defeat at the hands of the natives results in the loss of a single card, which is in turn beamed back into other players' games. From here, they then have the choice to keep the stolen card or, if altruism is their thing, send them back to you. This process of course works both ways, but, come on, why would you ever want to return someone else's hard-fought loot? Over to Hollow Ponds:
"That choice however will have big consequences. Every player in Loot Rascals has a Holographic Agent - a computer controlled copy of themselves who can visit other people’s games. If you decide to hang on to another player’s card, you may find yourself faced with their angry Hologram, trying to kill and loot you. Or, if you did right by them, and sent back their card, perhaps their Hologram will turn up to help you for a while..."
Again, it's early stages yet but that sounds mighty interesting. I look forward to more from Loot Rascals in the coming months as it heads towards its "Q1 2017" release. Which of course means at some point between January 1 and March 31 next year, to you or I.
Hollow Ponds, by the way, are a team partly comprised of ex-Hohokum devs - that equally-striking arty adventure-y PlayStation exclusive - so it's nice to see this is equally colourful and stylish.
