Developer: NEXT Studios (Tencent)
Release: October 2020
Steam Price: $28.05 AUD
The term Rougelike gets thrown around a whole lot these days. So much so that I’m not entirely sure what it means anymore, but in as much as a Rougelike is a turn-based procedurally-generated-dungeon-exploration game with an unwieldy control scheme, slightly off-beat sense of humour and an excuse instead of a plot, Crown Trick certainly meets the definition.
So, how isn’t it a Rougelike?1 Let me count the ways.
First and most importantly, Crown Trick is gorgeous. From the lovely opening cinematic and the crisp animations to the intriguing character designs, the whole thing is warm and funky and inviting, for all that it apparently takes place in the Nightmare Realm. Unfortunately, sometimes the cutesy art is a distraction from the actual gameplay, with the pretty effects making it hard to decode some of the necessary attack information. It’s nothing that a little patching couldn’t fix, and if all of the enemy moves were well telegraphed on the screen, this game would feel like so much more of a complete package.2 Rougelikes, even the ones with fancy tilesets instead of ascii art, tend to be pretty drab looking affairs and this very definitely isn’t that.
Secondly, in Crown Trick you have a single weapon - one of half a dozen or so basic types with random buffs attached, and must drop it if you want to use another that you find in the dungeon. You have four special attacks that you can gain from minibosses, these are are very powerful and versatile but consume MP. You have an unlimited stack of relics that grant passive buffs and seem to be wildly uneven in terms of usefulness. And you have a small grab-bag of up to four consumable doodads. Compared to the traditional full inventory of scavenged loot, this feels very limiting, and can make for a frustrating time if the randomiser doesn’t give you the tools that you want for upcoming encounters. Thankfully, each run is a lot less of a time commitment than a full dungeon dive in some games can be, so restarting isn’t such a big deal.
Thirdly, the combat is much more involved than the roguelike tradition of bumping your character into the enemy until one of you dies3, behaving more like a series of puzzles in which you try to work out how to combine your weapon, specials and limited teleports to successfully build combos and defeat the enemies in each encounter room. This is Crown Trick’s attempt at innovation, and it’s appealing in principle, promising to bring some much-needed depth to a genre that can be pretty stale, but even after just the three runs4 I’ve completed I am already finding the regular encounters to be very rote and the boss battles to be frustratingly opaque. Rather than inspiring me to try again straight away, like the repeated failures in a game like Hades, for example, these issues make me want to drop the game between runs, which is a bit of a death-knell for a game like this.
Finally, Crown Trick has a between-run section that allows you to apply ongoing powerups for future runs, akin to a game like Loop Hero. While this sort of meta-game is usually the thing that get a game firmly labelled as a rouge-lite, I really can’t stress enough how much more this feels like an old school Nethack experience than 95% of the games that fit into that category. Yes, unless you’re some kind of prodigy or speedrunning genius, you’ll have to play this through a few times to rank up your character enough to actually win, but it still scratches a lot of those Rouge-y itches, so I don’t think the label Rougelike, in as much as it still means anything, is all that out of line in this case.
It’s funny how just describing what a game isn’t can give you all you need to know, but I think that if you’ve gotten this far you’ve probably got a good idea of what to expect out of Crown Trick5. While it seems like a fresh take on an old favourite genre, I’m glad that I tried it out and I’d encourage anyone who has a copy to at least try it out for a couple of runs, I doubt I’ll be diving back into this one too many times, and I wouldn’t encourage anyone to pick up the Humble Choice bundle for it, either.
Where Rougelike is defined as being like Nethack or Castle of the Winds, the two true Rougelikes that I’ve spent any meaningful time with. If you’re not familiar with them, this whole post really isn’t going to make a lot of sense, so go download Nethack and come back in a few weeks.
That said, it got regular updates for 8 months and then it’s been 18 months of silence, so I don’t think any changes are likely to be forthcoming.
You can do that, but you’re not going to last very long.
And I admit I haven’t gotten that far, because while I like this sort of game I never pretended to be good as them.
Oh, we haven’t talked about the name! Is it a pun on hat-trick? If so, it’s not a great effort. I can only assume that like some of the dialogue, it’s just something that didn’t translate very well from whatever language it was originally written in.