Loop
Hero

Loop Hero (2021) is a dungeon-exploring adventure game where you place cards to create a world for your character to survive. Your hero automatically moves around a looped path and attacks enemies in their path. It stands out for how you must play cards that add lands and enemies for their treasure but not so many that your hero dies.

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You wake up in a small camp and set out to find the resources you need to improve your town. Each expedition starts on a looped path in an empty landscape. Your character automatically moves around the loop, fighting enemies he encounters. You take damage from these encounters but regain health each time you complete a loop. After each of these loops, you must decide if your hero can make it around again, and risk the loot they've won.

You play cards to affect the success or failure of each run, aiming to maximise how much treasure they win by killing enemies but not actually dying themselves. By playing Mountain, Meadow, Forest or Building cards you provide your hero different benefits. But these biomes can also spawn new enemies that block the path until they are defeated.

As you progress you learn how different cards interact with each other in unexpected ways. For example, placing lots of mountains together provides additional health but also spawns new enemies. Placing a Vampire Mansion next to a Village creates a Ransacked Village that spawns Ghouls to defeat.

The result is a game about balancing threats and benefits. What starts as a simple dungeon exploration challenge soon evolves into a complex combination of selecting the right cards for your next run, and then placing the correct combination of cards next to each other to maximise their benefits.

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Our examiner, Jo Robertson, first checked Loop Hero 4 years ago. It was re-examined by Andy Robertson and updated 3 months ago.