And the more I fail, the more I feel like I'm progressing. I may well fail within thirteen seconds, but I'll keep going again, pondering paying the 40% tithe to have the castle remain the same as the last run to better explore it, or try again with a particular boss fight. This is such a beautiful example of a carrot on a stick, always making me return to try again, knowing this time my swords hit that bit harder, or I have this much more health to start with, or I've unlocked this new class that moves much faster. At least, the easier it is to get further into the game until it gets madly hard again. Which is to say, the more you play, the easier the game gets. On each run you gather gold, and can then spend this in either the ever-growing skill tree, or at a number of merchants who'll improve your armour, weapons, and runes that allow extra abilities. This mixture of always-killing-you difficulty, with endless enticements to keep going, is then made even more welcoming by its deliberate step away from the traditional rogue-rules, in that progression is a key part of play. I mean, I get it, it's funny that the character is forgetful, or the game's text is jumbled up, or whichever, but I kind of wish it could have picked titles that aren't conditions that make people's lives really hard/awful.) ADHD, dyslexia, OCD, Alzheimer's, and so on, are all traits, and all feel in questionable taste as gags to include in the game. (I may as well put it in here that I felt, and still feel, super-uncomfortable about a bunch of these categories.

Near and far-sightedness will affect the blurriness of various parts of the screen, while stereo blindness means the game's characters are rendered as 2D flipping sprites (which is all excellently silly, since the game's 2D anyway, and it just changes their animations). Or perhaps have ADHD and move faster, or suffer from hypergonadism and thus knock enemies back farther. So you might be Mage, Barbarian, Knave or Shinobi (or six others, or evolutions of them), but you might also have gigantism and be enormous, or dwarfism and be tiny. Three possible choices are rolled from an extensive and ever-growing collection of classes and traits, both letting you try to lean toward builds you prefer, while often forcing you to play as classes you might otherwise avoid from habit. Because of course the key gimmick here was that with each death, you went on to play one of your own offspring. And yet it's as approachable as the wide-open arms of a teddy bear, constantly encouraging you to keep trying, keep playing, and most importantly, keep improving your chances. It's tough-as-nails in many senses, a randomly generated platformer that's ludicrously difficult, guaranteed to kill you over and over. Rogue Legacy stakes itself in such an interesting position. I prefer to think of it as the evolution of Spelunky we'll clearly never see from Derek Yu. So Rogue Legacy is an action-platform game in which you start over an awful lot. The title has become so splendidly meaningless at this point, blurring the RPGness of Rogue with the platforming of Spelunky with the tactics of deck-builders, we may as well call each what it is.

Gosh it's so infuriatingly tempting to begin every write-up about a roguelike/lite with some sort of family tree of the genre. With Rogue Legacy 2 possibly coming this summer, it seemed good timing to return to the 2013 original and explore what still makes it stand out from the crowd of rogues. But I am going to tell you how much I still enjoy playing Rogue Legacy, despite seemingly having failed to improve at it over seven years of playing. If I did you'd never invite me to play with your group in the playground again. I'm not going to tell you how dreadful I am at Rogue Legacy. Past Perfect is a retrospective column in which we look back into gaming history to see whether old favourites are still worth playing today.

Spelunky 2 physical copy