Progressing further allows him to piece together the interesting details of who’s pulling the strings and why. Zixu doesn’t have much in the way of personality, but it is enjoyable to listen to him impatiently explain to his handler at the detective agency that he already knows everything that is going to happen. It’s a tried-and-true time loop formula, and effective as a premise for a roguelite. Immediately after dying he wakes up in his bed, on the same morning of that same day, and given the same dispatch to investigate the same missing person. You play as Xiang Zixu, a generic tough-guy detective in techno-futurist Dragon City, who has been killed while investigating a missing person. But after riding this loop for close to 20 hours it’s clear to me that what it lacks in originality it more than makes up for by nailing the most important elements of the genre: outstanding gameplay, and making each run fresh and meaningful. None of its mechanics are groundbreaking, and the cyberpunk story – while cool – is filled with cliches. Loopmancer, which follows in the footsteps of other 2D action platformer roguelites such as Rogue Legacy and Dead Cells, opted for the latter – to great success. To stand out, a game must either do something extremely creative, or distinguish itself with quality and polish. It can feel like you are playing through a remixed version of the same concepts, just with different titles and gimmicks, time and again – lather, rinse and repeat. Something occurred to me as I poured hour after hour into Loopomancer: Roguelites have become so ubiquitous that playing a new one has become a sort of meta-loop of its own.
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