;;;;;
title: Rogue Legacy
tags: games
date: 2014-06-26 22:01
format: md
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A little while ago [Rogue Legacy](http://www.roguelegacy.com/) was on
sale on [gog.com](http://www.gog.com) and it looked like fun, so I
bought it. Today I "finished" it, by which I mean that I killed the
big boss and get to start over. There are still a lot of things I can
(try to) do, but the "story" is over.

So, at the start of this game you are a legendary knight and you go
into this castle, for what reason is not explained until later. This
game is about his children, somehow. At the end of the tutorial the
knight dies and a child of his will take his place and walk into the
very same castle, possibly to avenge their father.

Each time you die you get to pick a new child to work with, each has a
class which affects certain stats and each may have one or two traits.
These traits can be useful, funny, annoying or sometimes even make you
sick. Some traits include being near-sighted, having no pulse in your
feet or being a giant. They make for some interesting experiences and
some laughs as well. Classes include a Paladin which isn't
particularly good at anything, an Archmage which has a lot of magic
power, and a Knave which is pretty bad at everything except has a
killer critical hit.

Every time you enter the castle it will normally be completely
different from last time, save for a few constants. In my opinion this
makes it vastly replayable, as every time you have to start over
everything is new.

Thankfully this is not such a cruel game that every time you die you
have to start over from scratch. Each run through the castle will
result in some gold, this gold can be used by the next generation to
buy some upgrades, and thus level up. So even if you are exceptionally
bad at a game like this, as I probably am myself, you'll still be able
to make progress simply by trying over and over again. Of course there
are also better armors and weapons to be bought and runes to be
equipped to help you even more.

The gameplay is very nice. It's very action/platform in nature as
there is a lot of swinging of the sword, dodging of projectiles and
jumping on platforms to be had.

# Installation on linux

The game is available for linux, although since I bought it through
gog.com I only had an option of windows or mac. I didn't try asking
the developers if they could let me download the linux version since I
didn't think to check if there was one until I was already well
underway with my game.

It works in wine, version 1.7.20, at least. To install it in wine
first you'll need to have the proper XNA installed. On my Archlinux
installation this was a matter if installing winetricks and then using
it to install `xna`:

    sudo pacman -S winetricks
    winetricks xna

I didn't fully test it with a normal 64-bit wine prefix, but using a
32-bit one worked fine for me. After having installed XNA installation
of Rogue Legacy went fine and I didn't have any trouble playing it at
any point. On my laptop that is a different story, I just can't get it
installed there, even though it's the same version of everything I can
think of (it also has Archlinux installed).

# Conclusion

It's a very nicely designed game, both visually and gameplay-wise.
There are a lot of funny things in it and a lot of things for you to
find. You start out thinking you'll never ever be able to go through
the entire castle (or at least I did) only to find that gradually you
learn the enemies' ways and get stronger and things get easier, and
then you find a boss (and subsequently lose hope again, or at least I
did).

It took me some 34 hours and some minutes to kill the big boss and 136
generations of heroes, it was my first play through and I have to say
I was a little addicted during those hours, I haven't played a game
this much in a very long time.

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