LOOT RIVER
The earth moves in this Roguelike dungeon crawler
Developer Straka Studio
Publisher Superhot Presents
Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series
Origin Slovakia
Release TBA
We find ourselves, once again, in a dungeon. We switch between swords and spears, as swarms of ghouls and gribblies lurk just at the edge of our weapon range. When they get close and our attack connects, they spill orbs we can collect to upgrade our character. When we mistime a parry, and their swipe lands, it’s right back to the start. Yes, it’s another Roguelike dungeon-crawler, where the walls shift between each attempt – but this time we’re able to do a little shifting ourselves.
“I think games where you have the power to change and transform the world around you are very interesting,” Miro Straka, lead developer of Loot River, says. It’s a claim borne out in his work – before founding Straka Studios for this project, he made Euclidean Lands and Euclidean Skies, two iOS puzzlers whose levels were each wrapped around a kind of virtual Rubik’s Cube. “Those were games about rotation, and this is the game about translation,” he says. “It’s something I would like to see in games more. This is, in my opinion, the ultimate power fantasy.”