One Way Heroics - 2/20 hours

Roguelikes are the bane of my gaming existence. I want to like them so badly. They're just such a sophisticated idea. They feel like the sort of games a mature and responsible person should enjoy. You're given a starting point, a set of rules, and a procedurally generated world, and the point is to find out how far you can get based on nothing but your own skill. That's cool.

But then I try to play one and I suddenly remember that I'm a whiny baby who doesn't like to lose. Or, more flatteringly, I like continuity and growth and so having to start over from scratch every 20 minutes is just about the opposite of what I enjoy in a game.

One Way Heroics does toss me a bone or two in this direction, though. At the end of each playthrough, you earn points based on your performance, and these points can unlock various things like new classes, special abilities (though each class only has a certain number of ability slots that doesn't change from playthrough to playthrough), or extra slots in your dimensional vault. The vault allows you to keep your best items from playthrough to playthrough, and that's helpful, though items degrade over time and, well, a level one character with a powerful sword is still a level one character.

I was also wrong about this being a jrpg. It is turn-based, but a weird kind of hybrid turn-based where a turn passes for each "space" that you move and each time you press the attack button, but except in certain specialized situations, you're doing both things so often that it seems more like a real-time action-rpg. If we want to get really philosophical about this, it's a choice that highlights the arbitrary nature of video game time, because isn't a computer situation itself just a stringing together of discrete individual world-states in order to create the illusion of continuity? How rapidly does this have to occur for it to seem like "real time" to the player?

Judging just from my experience with this game, I'd have to say the answer is "somewhat more rapidly than One Way Heroics, but probably not by a lot." It all comes down to the fact that nothing else moves when you're standing still. It's not always something that registers, because the game encourages you to move constantly, but sometimes, it really matters - and about half of those times, I forget and panic by rapidly hitting buttons when I would be better served by slowing down, assessing my situation, and pushing one button at a time.