Video Game / Loop Hero

"My old memories of the world were gone. The path was empty again, and there was only darkness everywhere I looked."

— The Hero

Loop Hero is a Roguelike Deckbuilding Game developed by Four Quarters and published by Devolver Digital. It was released for PC on March 4, 2021 and for the Nintendo Switch on December 9, 2021.

The Lich has erased the world, plunging its remains into void and never ending chaos, in turn causing an endless time loop. The lone hero wanders a procedurally generated path on loop automatically. To restore the world, players wield a deck of mystical cards based on their memories to place enemies, buildings, and terrain during their expeditions.

---

The game provides examples of:

• Absurdly High Level Cap: The upper limit of the Supply cap is insanely huge and most players will only reach a fraction of it by the time they've beaten the final boss. Eventually, you can fill every non-essential squares with maxed out houses and you can stack so many copies of the same item that you can easily steamroll the first couple dozen loops without breaking a sweat.
• Accidental Discovery: The Lich didn't set out to become such. He was originally an archwizard who created a spell that puppeted his body while he slept so a copy of his mind could continue researching. He never considered that the spell and copy might continue to exist after he died.
• After the End: The game starts with nearly the entirety of the world outright erased, but the protagonist has the power to recreate it, using terrain cards to influence whatever loop they're currently traveling along.
• Always Chaotic Evil: Zigzagged but mostly Enforced by nature of the game's Grey-and-Gray Morality. The Hero's rebuilding of the world will inevitably-reintroduce hostile entities into it, such as Goblins, Bandits, Harpies, and Vampires. The first time around, the Hero will always try to reason with them, pointing out that with the world in its current state, they should be working together to survive instead of fighting. It never works; the Goblins don't care about saving the world and just want to rob because "it's in a Goblin's nature", the Bandits blame the rest of society for the situation and see robbery and murder as fair turnabout, the Harpies are more concerned about preying on the survivors to feed their starving children, and the vampires have gone mad with bloodlust due to the lack of sustenance in the environment. (The Vampires, at least, can come around through exploitation of the Geo Effects - though hostile ones will still spawn.)
• And the Adventure Continues: Beating Act IV has the Hero and Yota agree to keep trying to save other timelines and work to reunify the world for longer and longer stretches of time, until the time Omega reincarnates as Alpha again.
• Anti-Frustration Feature: Holding down the Retreat button will trigger the game to automatically pause on reaching the camp at the end of the current loop and ask if you want to retreat. This makes life easier when the map is heavily populated and the player character hard to locate. This also has the hidden benefit of allowing a retreat with full resources even if the boss has spawned in the camp.
  • There are also options to automatically pause whenever you finish a battle, are looking at equipment, or immediately after reaching the camp, which will also automatically give a prompt to retreat if it's been replaced with the boss time.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Any given road tile can only contain four normally spawned mobs, with a fifth special slot for Vampires, Watchers, and Tomes. Similarly, the Hero can only have four allies in the same tile as them. Bombardment from mobs in adjacent tiles are also limited to four on each side. Using a lantern will restrict the mob cap by one and can be stacked until no mobs are allowed to spawn on a tile.
• Artificial Stupidity: As combat is automatic, you do not get to choose your targets. This can occasionally create some frustrating encounters, as sometimes the hero will not prioritize the enemies that you want him to kill. Especially egregious with the Necromancer, whose Skeleton minions effectively choose random targets and can get you killed fast by no input of your own if they decide to spread their damage for no reason rather than just focusing on the most dangerous targets.
• Author Powers: The below Avatars don't like being pressured by the player for questions and force-quit the game to the menu. Their attack abilities also resemble them pulling up a coding menu.
• Author Avatar: The secret boss is a group of sprites based on the game's dev team. They offer to answer questions, but get huffy when asked something they hadn't fully thought out.
• Barrier Warrior: The Chapter II boss, the Priestess, is an antagonistic version that summons multiple stained glass mirrors that have a chance to take a hit for her. However, one of the possible traits unlocked by beating a boss gives a similar (but much less powerful) effect to the protagonist; in addition, the Necromancer can summon a Guard Skeleton that redirects all enemy hits towards itself until it dies.
• Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: The Lich froze the universe in time and broke it into tiny pieces - but he did it to protect the world from an even bigger threat, and are ultimately used by the Hero.
• Beyond the Impossible:
  • After placing enough Rock/Mountain terrain, a Goblin camp will appear. When first confronted, the protagonist notes he didn't intentionally summon them, and the Goblins claim they remembered themselves back into existence.
  • An unknown person complained to the Hunter that making black holes into hounds was impossible. The Hunter had already made two.
• Blood Knight: The Chapter III boss is a hunter and his two hounds that are basically sentient black holes, who carry out their task of tracking down and killing irregularities like the protagonist just for the thrill of the hunt.
• Bodyguard Betrayal: The Necromancer can face this if the player places Outposts; the guards despise them for raising the dead, and rain arrows upon both sides trying to eliminate everyone.
• Boss in Mook's Clothing: Sirens are among the most dangerous enemies in the game, particular in Acts 3 and 4, as their traits naturally synergize defensively with the Jellyfish they endlessly summon and the Fishmen likely to occur next to them, and that is on top of being able to output a lot of damage. In return however, they give some of the best drops of any non-boss enemy, and make it so the Chests that spawn on their tiles are never Mimics.
• Boss Rush: Chapter IV has the player deal with the bosses of all three previous Chapters before summoning the Final Boss, Omega. However, since the bosses are only summoned when enough map space is filled in, one or two of them could potentially be skipped if enough cards are placed at once.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The Arsenal. Giving your character an additional item slot is always useful, and it's downside is negligible in comparison to the other gold cards.
  • The Blood Grove. It will instantly kill any enemy below 15% health, including bosses. Deleting the Grove used to spawn it creates a Hungry Grove, which kills enemies at 20% health but can also attack the Hero.
  • Oblivion. This card clears any tile, both of placed cards and any monsters that have spawned. It's useful for clearing out annoying Bandit and Goblin camps, destroying dangerous monster stacks, or just tidying up the place when you misplace a card.
  • Slowing loops. Each completed loop increases the difficulty of enemies fought, which means the player should ideally minimize the number of loops they complete before fighting the boss. The best way to manage this is to only equip items that increase the Hero's defense and none that increase their damage in any way; this will significantly slow down fights, allowing time for more mobs to spawn each loop granting more cards early on.
  • The Necromancer's Art of Control trait, which adds +1 to your summoning cap.
  • Spiders. The second monster players will encounter, they don't have any notable drops, won't be transformed by geo effects, and don't develop any particularly dangerous abilities. However they are a roadside tile and so a single egg can spawn onto up to three tiles. And while they don't provide useful loot, they are a good source of easily farmed cards and will trigger the Ancestral Crypt's health upgrade.
• Brain Uploading: An archiwzard created a magical version of this, a spell that copied his mind and could then puppet his body while he slept. Said spell kept functioning even after he died, becoming the Lich.
• Bragging Rights Reward: It is possible to set up an endless loop in the fourth level (where there the limits on the amount of resources you can gain per run are removed), gaining infinite resources simply by leaving your computer running... but in order to do this you must, by definition, beat the final boss, since he'll appear along the way as you set the loop up; after that there's no real challenges to spend your infinite resources on.
• Came Back Wrong: Chapter IV reveals that the god Alpha was once stabbed by a human they created, who thought he was a threat because of his inhuman glow. Alpha was so surprised they let a part of himself die, and he eventually reincarnated into Omega, whose sole wish was to recreate that surprise by erasing humanity until a new challenger appeared.
• Caught in the Ripple: Most characters aren't aware that the world has fallen apart around them, and remember more of it only as the protagonist does.
• Chest Monster: Although most chests are just inanimate objects that can be beaten until they drop loot, some are actually monsters that attack back.
• The Chosen One: The protagonist, who has the power to recreate parts of the world because they're the sole descendent of the only man in history that stood up to Alpha the Creator and transformed him into Omega. Omega subconsciously wished to test that man's descendant and so the Hero was not completely destroyed.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: The Hero's ability to remember what the world was like before its destruction allows him to slowly rebuild it.
• Clone by Conversion: The Priestess is mortal but whenever she dies her soul will inhabit another priestess, gradually transforming her body and snuffing out the original soul. This is apparently involuntary and she does regret the suffering it causes.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: Four colors of gear, which reflect the number of secondary stats on the item. White items have only the base stat, blue have one secondary stat, yellow has two or three secondaries, and orange has three or four.
• Conspicuous Consumption: Vampires love showing off their status, whether with elaborate manors or by having the best villages.
• Cowardly Mooks: In Act II and later Scorch Worms have a 40% chance of fleeing combat at low health rather than being killed. A Blood Grove will kill them before this can trigger.
• Crapsack World: The game does not shy away from portraying how terrible it is to live in an Eldritch Location that used to be a universe. The land the Hero used to live in was basically Transylvania, extremely rough but with nothing on this.
• Creative Sterility: Goblins are extremely good at copying human design as a means of self-preservation, but are completely incapable of understanding the things they're copying or innovating on them. They construct all their forts the exact same way, including putting up tents they never use, and putting a watchtower on their forts is less of them adapting to the situation and more like following a different template in case of harsher environment.
• Crystal Dragon Jesus: The imagery of Lich and especially Priestess evokes this, and Alpha's appearance and death have a lot of similarities to biblical depictions.
• Deadly Book: Accumulated knowledge becomes magical. People being people they of course still build libraries even though they occasionally lose one to going prompt critical, and of course they further concentrate magic into spellbooks, even thoughs that's like refining uranium. Spellbooks kill people when angered, or in driving them to obsessed with magic until they learn enough to add a spell to the book, or if you can't withstand their wisdom, or if you walk up to them in game.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: The only penalty for being defeated during a run is reducing the amount of gathered resources you can take back to town, and even that can be eliminated if you've got the right items.
• Deckbuilding Game: For each expedition the player must pick a mix of cards from four categories: Road, Roadside, Terrain, and Special. On killing a monster there's a chance for one or more cards to be drawn which are then placed to fill the map. The game starts with a limited set of cards to choose from, while improving the player's base and completing certain expedition objectives unlock the rest.
• Deity of Human Origin: The Hunter was originally a human but at some point became the anthropomorphic personification of black holes, wandering the galaxy killing stars.
• Destroyable Items: Starting in Act II, Bandits gain the ability to destroy the player's items, both in the inventory and equipped.
• Developer's Foresight: If the hero encounters two or more different types of monsters that he hasn't talked to before in a single battle, he will only converse with one of them. The next time he meets one of the monsters he didn't talk to, he will preface the conversation with "I think we've already met..."
• Disc-One Final Boss: The Lich that reduced the world to its empty state is merely the Chapter I boss, and reveals himself to be an envoy of a greater power upon defeat.
• Dynamic Difficulty:
  • Although the strength of monsters is somewhat increased for every Loop done in a run, the main challenges are self-inflicted, due to terrain cards interacting with each other. For example, placing a lot of Mountain and Rock terrain together will create a much larger Mountain Peak that boosts the player's HP, in addition to summoning Harpies and Goblin raiders on their route.
  • The developer secret bosses have abilities which scale their difficulty proportional to the player's activity. Deceiver's health increases based on the total number of monsters the Hero has slain; Blinch gains extra Evasion the longer the current expedition has run; TheRandom gains attack damage based on Encyclopedia completion; and Finlal attacks faster the more the current map has been filled.
• Egomaniac Hunter: The Hunter loves to be praised when he saves people and views the approaching end of reality as an opponent.
• Eldritch Location: What's left of the planet is a surreal, strange wasteland that is constantly recreated and dissolves based on the memories of people exploring it. In fact, several people who have stable memories just living together creates a permanently stable settlement.
• Existential Horror: Omicron had a moment of this prior to his death, becoming increasingly uncertain whether he was the living man or a copy of his mind controlling his body via a spell. Dying so that only the spell remained cleared things up.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: The protagonist can unlock three different classes, each of which changes their appearance and abilities. The Warrior is specialized in melee, the Rogue is focused on attack speed, and the Necromancer mainly summons the undead to fight in their stead.
• Fallen Hero: The main bosses started out with good intentions, but turned into this:
  • The Lich was a powerful mage trying to avert The End of the World as We Know It due to entropy. Confronted with the reality of Omega, he came to the conclusion that speeding entropy along was the best course in hopes that Alpha would be reborn in the end.
  • The Priestess is a saint of unwavering faith, following with her God's plan even after realizing he's turned to evil.
  • The Hunter is a hero who saved worlds from Eldritch Abominations, but upon discovering the unstoppable nothingness consuming the stars he decided to Mercy Kill the rest.
  • Alpha's death at the hands of a human turned him from a creator god to a destroyer god, craving one last confrontation against humanity.
• Fish People: Reeds will spawn Fishmen, while Shipwrecks spawn the Sirens, who act as their leaders. The Hero notes that ordinarily they should be coming out of the ocean rather than the river.
• Flesh Golem: The tissue not consumed by Blood Groves is fused together into Flesh Golems which serve as their "fruit".
• Friendly Enemy: Omega isn't, by nature, a cruel creature, just one who instinctively prefers Primordial Chaos over anything else. When encountered, he has a pleasant chat with the Hero about what drives a world to keep living After the End, and them willingly lets them try to kill him to stop the dissolution of the world.
• Friendly Neighborhood Vampire: Zig-Zagging Trope. Prior to the end of the world, Vampires had a symbiotic relationship with humanity at large, protecting their settlements in exchange for blood, though it's implied that this didn't usually work out as well as the vampires would like to pretend. After the calamity, they've been driven mad with insatiable bloodlust. This is demonstrated in-game by how Villages near a Vampire Mansion will initially be Ransacked before eventually getting rebuilt and prospering under the rule of Vampires.
• Foreshadowing: Conversations with a Tome enemy consists of a series of images of pages. While incomprehensible at first glance, reading them closely will detail the entire plot. In particular, when the hero asks them "what's happening now?", they respond with an alchemical diagram that details what's happening to the universe, the role Alpha and Omega play in it, and the three other bosses; when the hero expresses confusion, they follow up with a page full of religions iconography whose images detail how Alpha died and became Omega, kickstarting the game's plot. But you're unlikely to to understand any of it unless you've already beaten the game.
• Genius Loci: The forest doesn't only have some level of sentience, it has a Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory and tries to rebuild the world as it remembers. The results range from uncanny living buildings to Plant People designed to resemble humans a bit too well.
• Genre Mashup: The game combines RPG mechanics, an auto-battler system, Tower Defense, a deckbuilding element, and a macrogame base-building segment between each run.
• Geo Effects: One of the core game mechanics. By placing land tiles, you can give yourself stat boosts, introduce modifiers to fights, and influence monster spawns.
• Glass Cannon: Placing Deserts and Dunes can turn the player into this as it significantly decreases the health of both the player and enemies.
• God Was My Copilot: The protagonist learns in the final Chapter that the village mayor Yota was a godly being similar to Alpha/Omega that introduced Probability into the world, enabling unlikely outcomes such as the defeat of a God.
• Guide Dang It!: Astral Orbs, which are necessary for several end-game buildings, are the hardest material to acquire as very few enemies drop the required Time Shards. While Prime Materia drop them, the chance of one spawning is exceptionally low. Time Watchers can drop it normally, but they tend to flee combat before death. Instead the best method is to exhaust a Bookery so it begins spawning Tomes on nearby road tiles and place either a Vampire Mansion or Temporal Beacon overlapping the road to create mages. If you don't use a Bookery or never allow one to exhaust, there's a good chance you'll never see an Astral Orb in your entire playthrough.
• Heroic Lineage: Omega reveals that the Hero's ancient ancestor was the one who killed Alpha.
• Humanoid Abomination: The Hunter, the Chapter III boss, is effectively a sentient black hole in human form. A very bloodthirsty black hole.
• Humans Are Survivors: A major theme of the game is that even after the world has been destroyed humanity won't give up on finding a way to survive. When told the world will remain in its current shattered state for eons while Omega is being reborn, the Hero vows humanity will rebuild the world on its own and be there to greet Omega.
• Humans Through Alien Eyes: One encyclopedia entry on the plant people shows their impression of humans as bizarre mockeries of life.
• Interface Screw:
  • Omega's special ability temporarily erases one of your items and one stat from existence. When this happens, the item and stat line are replaced with the same black mists as the map background.
  • After defeating the secret developer bosses, the screen begins to shake before cutting to a Twilight Zone-esque TV. Then you're dumped back at the menu as if you'd just started the game.
• Kill One, Others Get Stronger: Goblins and Goblin Leaders get a power boost whenever any of their allies are killed, and the power boosts stack.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: A key part of getting materials, to expand your settlement and unlock upgrades, is to know when to retreat before a potentially deadly fight so you can keep most of what you've gathered. Or even better, know when to forego doing another loop so you can keep everything.
• Last Bastion: The protagonist's town is the last settlement that hasn't been wiped off the map due to the Lich or other terrors, due to the amount of people there with coherent memories. By going on adventures, it can be rebuilt into humanity's greatest defense against entropy.
• Level Scaling: The stats of enemies will increase with each completed loop.
• Life Drain: Vampirism is a stat which allows the player to heal an amount relative to the damage they inflict on an enemy. Vampire Manors create a geoeffect that grants this to all units in a battle.
• Low-Level Advantage: Spawning bosses quickly, when the player has only completed two or three loops, makes them much less challenging compared to later loops.
• Macrogame: By going on adventures, the player gathers resources from the environments they rebuild, such as rock (from placing mountains) or scrap metal (from throwing away spare equipment). These resources are brought back to town, and can be used to build/upgrade new structures, unlocking new classes and abilities for the player.
• Magikarp Power:
  • Placing a Vampire mansion next to a Village will turn it into a Ransacked Village, which spawns four ghouls every two days. However, after three Loops it turns into a Count's Lands, which grants greater benefits than a normal Village tile (better healing and quest rewards, plus bandits cannot spawn on it).
  • The Bookery shuffles up to three of the cards in your hand every time you pass it which seems like a useful if boring ability. However, it can only do this twenty times before it becomes empty and causes a Tome to join combat in any adjacent tile. Tomes, along with the Mages they can produce via Geo Effects, are the most reliable source of the rare Time Shards.
• The Minion Master:
  • The Necromancer fights by summoning Skeletons to fight for them. While they initially only summon two, depending on the stats of their gear they can summon more skeletons than there are maximum enemies.
  • The Hunter fights with his Hounds, smaller black holes in somewhat canid forms.
  • Sirens have a chance to summon a Jellyfish to defend them.
• Necessary Drawback:
  • Placing the right combinations to create more powerful Geo Effects will inevitably come with drawbacks; the most immediate one is the Mountain Peak that appears with a 3x3 grid of Mountains and/or Rocks; MASSIVE Max HP boost, but will also spawn hostile Harpies along the path every so often.
  • The gold cards each give the player a significant bonus that applies to the entire map but each comes with its own particular drawback. The Ancestral Crypt for example gives the player one free resurrection at full health and grants additional maximum health for each creature with a soul killed. However this comes at the cost of negating all the health points on equipment.
• No Ontological Inertia: The path only exists so long as the Hero is walking on it. As soon as he returns to camp and stops actively remembering it, everything returns to the void.
  • Overall, this is the effect of the Lich's spell. The Oblivion card available to the Hero destroys a tile and reverts the surroundings as if it's never existed.
• Non-Malicious Monster: Omega doesn't hate anyone, it's just that the very nature of his existence is to speed entropy. Beating him, and so breaking the inevitable slide into nothingness and allowing the world to heal, is simply surprising and impressive to him.
• Not Helping Your Case: A vampire noble, accused of creating Blood Clots by villagers, threatened to have them all fed to Blood Clots if they didn't shut up. He laments to another vampire this just made things worse.
• Not So Above It All: The camp leader acts less than impressed when the Hero restores a river, but when he suggests going for a swim she immediately agrees.
• Not So Omniscient After All: Omega seems to be all-knowing if prone to some human foibles, but he's taken by surprise on meeting Yota, a god he had no idea existed. She notes that the universe is so large that even beings such as them don't know all it contains.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: The Frog King has only 2 HP, but has an ability that reduces all damage he takes to 1 HP and an estimated 99.9% evasion rating which makes actually hitting him the two require times nigh impossible.
• Optional Boss:
  • A secret boss encounter can be activated by overlapping six different geo effects on one road tile and then using Oblivion on it. The encounter is significantly harder than the boss from the same act.
  • Another secret boss can be found by Filling the entire road with swamp tiles; however, unlike the other secret boss, it's mostly treated as a joke, and is unable to damage to the Hero
  • One last secret boss can appear if you take the "Second Thoughts" trait when two or fewer other traits exist. The boss can remove traits from the player, but by this point the player should be powerful enough to destroy it in seconds.
• Our Liches Are Different: The initial threat to the world is a Lich, who gained the power to erase most of the world, with the survivors being stuck in an endless loop of sufferings. The archmage Omicron created a spell that perfectly copied his mind and could puppet his body while he slept. After dying the spell persisted, creating the Lich.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Killing a living enemy near a battlefield may cause a ghost to spawn, which in turn can spawn a "Ghost of a Ghost", and that has a chance to spawn a "Prime Material", who can kill you instantly if you're not careful.
• Our Goblins Are Different: Goblins are a mountain race who are smart enough to use tools and not much else. They love ambushing, stealing, and cursing a great deal. Laying enough rock or mountain tiles will cause a goblin camp to spawn which will regularly spawn Goblins and Goblin Leaders; next to a swamp, it'll gain a Goblin Archer.
• Our Vampires Are Different: The Vampire Mansion tile will spawn Vampires as enemies. Aside from being able to drain health they can summon bat swarms to fight alongside them.
• Plant Person: These are the result of the forest's attempt to recreate civilization. They are initially immobile dummies, but the lore entries mention them being more advanced as time moves on.
• Power Up Let Down: There's an inverted example, strangely enough. Enemies in later chapters gain additional powers, but in a few cases these powers only benefit the hero, such as Vampires dealing damage to all living creatures instead of just the player.
• Reality Is Out to Lunch: The protagonist is building the world piece by piece. These pieces try to adapt to each other to avoid paradoxes, but some combinations result in reality breaking down:
  • Obliterating a tile when it's spawning an enemy will replace it with a Black Slime. Its lore entry is a database error.
  • A wheat field that's never been sown will have its blades of grass replaced with literal blades.
  • The forest's attempts at rebuilding human civilization are houses of living wood and vines with eerie moving replicas of humans inside.
  • More generally, the menu screen shows what the loop looks like from an in-person perspective: A path and chunks of terrain floating suspended in a black void.
• Real-Time with Pause: The game can be paused by right-clicking. Additionally, the game automatically pauses when inspecting or manipulating inventory.
• Restart the World:
  • The Sinister Minister of Chapter II claims this is God's motivation for letting everything come to pass. She's half-right; Omega does, but it's not any intentional desire on his part. It's just his nature after he reincarnated.
  • After defeating Omega, he states the world that existed is gone, but he will recreate it when he is reborn as Alpha. The Hero decides that humanity will rebuild the world on its own.
• Resurrective Immortality: The Hunter reveals that after he dies he'll be reborn in the heart of the galaxy's supermassive black hole.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Normal people didn't remember that the disappearing stars existed in the first place and, after the world ends, can't remember what existed before the void. Several story characters, most notably the protagonist and bosses, remember what is happening to the world.
• Shout-Out:
  • The names of every single song in the game's soundtrack are all JoJo references, with names like "Lich Is Unbreakable", Steel Boss Run", "Golden Win", and many more.
  • There's an encyclopedia entry by a chief named "Thordon Damsay", referencing to one Gordon Ramsay.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: The hero may sympathize with some of their enemies, but reacts this way to the bosses.
• Sinister Minister: The Chapter II boss is a Priestess (and her literal Guardian Angel) that claims to have been empowered by a God that wishes to Restart the World, and considers the protagonist a heretic for fighting back.
• Small Role, Big Impact: The Lich; he's the one who started all of this chaos, but ultimately he was just the hand that held the knife. His ultimate backers are still out there.
• Sore Loser: After defeating the secret developer bosses their leader will admit they should gracefully accept defeat... and then boots you to the menu.
• Star Killing: The Hunter's weapon is capable of killing stars.
• The Stars Are Going Out: The opening cinematic reveals this was happening just before the Lich destroyed the world. Backstory on both the Lich and Hunter reveal that there has been a growing region of non-existence in the universe for eons, but normal humans can't remember it existed in the first place.
• Straw Nihilist: Lore eventually reveals the Lich to be one; he was an archwizard terrified of entropy, and discovering that it is core to the nature of the universe led him to believe that speeding the process was the only meaningful choice as he believed it would lead to Omega being reborn as Alpha. The entire game is about doing and showing the exact opposite.
• Theme Naming: The bosses and one other character use Greek letters as their names. Omicron the Lich, Sigma the Priestess, Tau the Hunter, Omega the Destroyer, Alpha the Creator, and Yota, Goddess of Probabilities.
• This Cannot Be!: The Lich's reaction to being defeated. In a delightful variation, the hero brushes it off as villainous ranting, and it takes two more bosses for him to catch on to how the Lich is right: he's been stabbing things to death who straight up can't be stabbed to death.
• Tower Defense: The map building portion of the game is a twist on the genre, as the player is essentially defending against their own character.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: The destruction of reality by Omega is the result of the Hero's ancestor killing Alpha, resulting in his rebirth as Omega.
• The Watcher: A type of enemy that spawns when a Temporal Beacon is placed down, spawning a Humanoid Abomination that buffs enemies a (5*loop) magic shield. They're also a Metal Slime in that they have 1 in 3 chance to either take Scratch Damage or a Critical Hit before teleporting out. If they're next to an Abandoned Bookery, then a Watcher Mage will appear where like Vampire Mages turns them into Tomes on the first time they get killed. They'll also either do no damage, or 200% damage.
• When Trees Attack: Blood Groves are carnivorous trees that live in symbiosis with ordinary trees, using their vines to kill and digest weakened creatures. If deprived of other trees, they become a Hungry Grove which will attack for more viciously. This has the effect of instantly killing an enemy that drops below a certain health percentage, with the Hungry Grove periodically dealing damage to the Hero.

---