Crowning Glory?
Roguelikes and roguelites have a tendency to throw players through their shapeshifting gauntlets of murder and death at a rather frenetic pace. Recent popular examples, such as Hades and Dead Cells, really emphasise this almost uniform focus on speed and it’s one that’s quite understandable in a genre where repetition is such a fundamental part of the core process, with the ability to blaze your way through places you’ve been multiple times almost essential to negating potential player boredom or fatigue.
It’s here however that Crown Trick, NEXT Studio’s brand new roguelite adventure, differs most from the rest of the crowd. It has just as many complex moving parts; weapons, spells, environmental traps, relics, upgrades, trinkets, chests and so on, but the pace of the movement and combat here is often glacial in comparison to how The Beheaded or Zagreus get down to business. Crown Trick eschews fast and fluid hack-and-slash action then, in favour of a slower turn-based style that sees your enemies move or attack only when you do. Take a step here and the various poisonous goblins, killer chickens and mad scientists around you will obligingly follow suit, attack and they’ll take action. It’s a dungeon-crawler that takes a leaf out of Crypt of the Necrodancer‘s book and, for the most part, it results in a satisfyingly tense, tactical and atmospherically good time.
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