"Loop Hero" is the re-hydrated essence of a dozen misremembered ancient games. From the moment the 16-color title screen fades in with dramatic chiptune, you feel like you're playing a forgotten fantasy RPG from the VGA era, a game that still contains the mysteries and conundrums of 1991, but has been gently modernized for 2021.

This is not nostalgia for nostalgia's sake. Loop Hero presents a novel and straightforward gameplay format that is strangely engrossing, given that the majority of your play time is spent empty-handed.

You repeatedly send one of three hero classes (Warrior, Rogue, or Necromancer) on expeditions to an empty road in the middle of nowhere. While your little heroes automatically roam this stony path, you enter the rest of the world yourself by playing cards from graveyards, battlefields, villages, meadows, mountains, etc., one by one. These environment cards change the hero's and enemies' stats, such as attack speed and HP, and create enemies that automatically fight each other as they pass by, such as ghosts, rat wolves, bandits, and spider packs.

It is this indirect action that Loop Hero adds to the roguelike "fight, die, repeat" formula. You do not decide where to move or what to attack. All you can do is build the level itself and hope that the machine you are piecing together gives you enough XP, resources, and equipment to make you stronger, but not kill you outright. What happens if you drop a bunch of spider cocoons and sand dunes to lower the creature's HP? What happens when you cross river cards with roads? Would my Warrior be able to withstand two adjacent tiles filled with giant sandworms?

Loop Hero becomes a game of managing the vicious cycle, a gauntlet of perpetually replaying deadly shit that levels up with each completed loop. Make it too hard, and you get hammered. Make it too easy and you won't be able to beat the bosses or earn enough resources to make the journey worthwhile. Lumber, food, and the mysterious orbs needed to return to camp to build new structures and upgrades are the permanent layers of the looping hero.

My favorite design element was a hidden effect that triggered when certain cards were played: drop 9 mountain cards in a 3x3 grid and they would transform into giant Everest peaks, giving a mega boost to maximum HP. But surprise, surprise, the mountains you create are inhabited by harpies, which become a difficult enemy, flying into random places on the board every few days. Also, when the tenth mountain or rock card is played, a goblin encampment will randomly appear on the road, creating a nasty, fast-attacking enemy.

These surprises are arbitrary, suggestive, and fun. It's refreshing to play a game that doesn't even hint at how to unlock some of the powerful effects. But by the time I had played for 15 or 20 hours, I wanted more of these surprise interactions. Unfortunately, they are not evenly sustained throughout the four-chapter "campaign."

The other aspect of Loop Hero's spare interactivity is the almost constant task of swapping out pieces of equipment: helmets, shields, and enchanted contraptions. The inventory is fixed to the screen, and as you defeat monsters, new gear of different rarities pops into your inventory. This is like a hyperdimensional version of an action RPG like Diablo, and it's fun and effective. Would you rather have a 25% increase in attack speed or a 15% increase in defense? Then a few seconds later, there are new boots with a higher evasion rate, but is this better than increasing the chance of a critical hit?

One indictment against all loot management is that, like its enigmatic card effects, Loop Hero does not account for the relative value of all combat stats. In the case of the Necromancer in particular, one had to guess whether the +4.3 "Skeleton Level" was worth as much as the +24% "Summoning Quality." Does buffing one's attack speed also make the skeleton hit faster? Unknown. Similarly, despite the tooltips in Loop Hero, some of the enemy abilities are hard to understand. One could argue that this lack of explanation is a deliberate and nostalgic part of retro RPGs that don't offer tutorials or hand-holding; beware of the possibility of opening Loop Hero's wiki and ruining its best surprises; Loop Hero's in-game encyclopedia is a smart way to alleviate confusion (don't forget to unlock the actual lore paragraphs for ultra-commonplace items like dressers as a bonus).

Loop heroes have some fun class-specific nuances. The Necromancer was my favorite class. Combat with multiple enemies can be a pleasantly tense war of attrition where the necro struggles to summon enough skeletons. Rogues need to reach the campfire tile to gain loot, so they often hold their breath until this goal is reached. Necromancers have a unique amulet slot that gives them a powerful HP overshield, an accessory that is unaffected by cards that lower their maximum HP.

These are great little pockets of depth, considering that you can't control the battle except with the equipment you wear. My small disappointment is that the builds I came up with for rogues greatly outperformed the ones I came up with for warriors and necromancers.

Loop Hero is the intensive experience of watching numbers grow in a video game, and it's terribly fascinating.

The style of the game has something in common with the so-called "idle" or "clicker" games that have appeared in the last few years, as well as with 2012's Half-Minute Hero. The most successful point of Loop Hero is the middle zone between "seeing," "planning," and "acting The greatest success of "Loop Hero" is that it creates a place in the zone between "seeing," "planning," and "acting. Each moment is supported by excellent music and sound design. A cutting slash, a giant mosquito's buzz, the unlubricated sound of skeletons coming to life. I love the creepy little organ you hear every time you drop the Vampire Mansion, one of Loop Hero's toughest villains, down a level.

This is the kind of smart, focused revival of an old game that I want more of, one that feels old and new with every step of the expedition. I have spent over 40 hours on this little game.